Autumn Journal: All is Well

All is well.

Day by day, the self erodes like a cliff face battered by relentless waves. More than a year has passed since my legs last bore my weight, each sunrise marking another measure of decline. That which I once believed defined me slips away—the cool mist on my face as a boat speeds from a sleeping harbor, the wind’s rush during low-altitude motorcycle flights on two wheels, the quiet communion with nature along leaf-strewn trails. My hands, once eager instruments of creation and adventure, now falter at the simplest tasks. Dignity fades as gradually and inevitably as autumn light.

But all is well.

Now, even the most basic acts require help. Bathing becomes a choreographed dance with a caregiver. Eating, once a joy, is now an effort and a risk. The most private functions—once taken for granted—now depend on the gentle kindness of others. An itch on my cheek, once a fleeting annoyance, looms like an insurmountable peak. The mirror reflects a stranger—hollow cheeks, eyes heavy with fatigue, a pale echo of former vitality. Breath, once as natural as the tide, now comes labored, punctuated by the rhythmic whir of machines.

But all is well.

This disease carves away the shoreline of self, leaving behind an unrecognizable landscape. Memories flicker like an old film: the hedge fund executive running the full circuit of Central Park before dawn, muscles burning. The startup founder, voice hoarse from urging others onward. The commercial fisherman, muscled arms straining against heavy gear, salt spray stinging eyes squinted against the Alaskan sun. A father’s back, strong and sure, carrying a giggling child through countless adventures.

But all is well.

Soon, this erosion will sweep away even the mind, and these memories will scatter like leaves in a gust.

But all is well.

For as the sand and soil wash away in this gradual dissolution of self, what remains is radiant. 

It reveals a vastness, quiet as the space between heartbeats, still as the pause before dawn. A stillness beyond stories, beyond names and roles, beyond the reach of disease or death, beyond memory or forgetting, beyond the storms of time and space.

Luminous. Not the center of all things, but the very substance from which all things arise, as water gives birth to waves.

Luminous. Neither beginning nor end—for outside of time, such concepts lose meaning.

Luminous. Not the bedrock, but the mind of being—constantly combining, dissolving, and recombining in an eternal river of thought.

Those who recognize it watch the ebb and flow of life with equanimity. They know that all things—our greatest joys and deepest sorrows, our moments of strength and times of frailty—are but ripples on the surface of a vast, eternal, and all-encompassing self.

So, all is well.