On Two Forms of Friction

Which suffering did you choose for yourself?
Does the loss of someone close depend on you?
And when the body betrays — a suffering that pulls you under.

See then the difference between falling and suspension.
The tension that refuses to release.
What makes it suffering is precisely this impossibility.
Forget intensity. Attend to structure.
Meaning dissolves, plans turn to ash —
and you cannot even say why.

This is the friction: not imposed from without, but inherent in the very fact of awareness.

Fleeing the run itself — into awareness, irony, cynicism.
Motion without progress. You stand still.
Run faster, dig deeper, leap higher than the other fleas —
and remain within the same space of the self.
The friction does not end.
For you are the source.

Your stance: “I against the world.”
Or your conviction: “Things ought to be otherwise.”

At last, laugh at this knowing.
Remember how it feels — to suffer by choice!
And tell yourself: “Behold the friction.
And there — the position, and the ever-changing life.
Here I am — suffering from suffering itself.”

Relinquish the illusion of choice.
Nothing to accept, nothing to release.
Only the act of seeing, held.
You are presence within the present.
The urge to close your eyes — yet you keep looking.
Not “I must hold on,” but simply: “I will not flee.”
And fleeing is visible as fleeing.
And there is nowhere to run,
for the runner too is seen.

Involuntary suffering is like carrying a stone.
Heavy, yet you were conditioned to it from birth.
Even to the hellish — it is so predictable.
Voluntary suffering is like holding a stone over an abyss.
Each second is first. Each is new.
No “I have been holding,” only “I hold now.”

Not grief for something lost, but longing for what is essential.
For that which awareness has forced upon you.
You did not choose to hold, nor is releasing a choice.
For the one who releases assumes a position anew.

Suffering stretches across the horizontal plane, takes its place,
and dwells there indefinitely.
So too the capacity to hold — scattered across forms, it waits.

And then you say: “Yes, here I am holding.”
Yet are you not merely holding the idea of holding?
Once more a form of involuntary suffering, a new identity.

You will recognise true holding
by unbearable lightness — and unbearable weight.
Remember once more: there is no one who holds!
The process of holding becomes as unnoticed as breathing.
And here — you notice it, yet continue to hold, without turning away, even smiling.
And it matters not what you hold —
the pain of loss or the clarity of senselessness.
Holding itself becomes the object you hold.

There is no other trajectory — only this one,
which leads through holding itself,
through the point where holding and holder align, where your “I suffer” fits into itself, like interlocking gears.
And then — it occurs.
You have not ceased to suffer, nor have you found meaning.
The project called “I” simply dissolves.
There is no longer anyone to whom suffering or the world belong.

You carry the stones once more, yet you see that you carry them.
And you see that this process cannot be halted.
Yet now, there is no “mine” or “not mine.”

Begin now to play with them, as a child might.
Build houses, knowing they will collapse.
For you are movement itself, building.
Without aim, without result, without claiming: “This is mine.”

Now the horror that you are aware, and cannot stop it — no longer shatters you.
It only sharpens. Lightens.

If you see — hold.
If you do not see — wander.
That is your place within the space of the self.
But remember the distinction:
between the stone you carry unnoticed,
and the stone you hold, fully aware that you hold it.
Between the friction that wears you down,
and the friction that sharpens you.
Between the sleep that masquerades as life,
and the wakefulness that feels like sleep.