We forget so much.

Yet, the world has a way of humanizing us, of teasing or shocking us into beginning to remember. The loss of a job, the death of a loved one, one’s own imminent death: one way or another, at some time or another, we are all brought up short.

Often, though, when tragedy occurs, we have little or no time to learn to see again. Unalloyed regret or grief can become the fertile soil of blackest despair.

Desperately, we turn to the old books and to the old rituals. We read, we think, we pray, we worship. But years of two-dimensional seeing and living cannot be overcome so easily.

Think of the ancient, liberating ideas as lenses, corrective lenses. But they are of little immediate effect with eyes long set in depthless focus.

What happens? Some of us cling pretty mindlessly to the old ideas, chanting the words repeatedly as if the very sound and sequence of syllables has some magic power. Others of us recoil from any suggestion of depth and pursue long, "successful" lives huddled on the thin, fragile, tiny plane of physical cause-and-effect which we call "reality."

Death comes to be seen as relief, or release, or escape, or simply as blessed cessation. Things stop. We hope or we believe or we fear that things just stop.

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