Unfinished

We are on the plane from Boston to Bangkok. We stop in Narita, Japan for a few hours, change planes, and will arrive in Bangkok late on Saturday night. On Tuesday, after a few days of R&R, we will fly to Vientiane, Laos. There we will pick up again the project that we are slowly trying to finish: building and supporting a library at Wat Phou That in Oudomxay. We are hoping the library will be built by the end of 2014, but there are so many unanswered questions that we hope to answer on this trip. There is a plan. There are documents and approvals. There are two builders whom we can choose from. But we haven’t actually seen any of this.

There are so many things that I have wanted to do in Laos that are yet unfinished. And over the last few weeks I have found myself feeling more and more conscious of this weakness I have for leaving things unfinished. It's as if a lifelong pattern were playing itself out in the very thing I feel I am motivated to do: build a permanent and complete connection to Andy and Laos. It is elusive. It is impossible. In fact, I suppose, being finished is impossible for almost all of us in the end.

Before we left, I found myself busily trying to tie up loose ends: closing up a family summer house; finding elusive made-in-anywhere-but-China gifts for those I was about to meet; completing contracts with new partners; approving the design of a new website; testing a new electronic data feed; purging sentimental pictures, things, and papers left behind by my grandparents, my mother and father, my brother, and my beloved son Andy and dragging to the attic half of these things too dear to part with; visiting a safe-deposit box looking for an important document which I seem to have misplaced. When I leave, I do not want to leave behind my things, loose ends, and unfinished work, but I will.

I am flying over the Arctic at this moment. The moon is shimmering in the dark afternoon sky. An old resident of the place 40,000 feet below, a burden to family and ready for death might walk off of an ice floe somewhere in the Arctic below into the deepest frigid sea, leaving nothing behind to burden his or her family but memories, stories, or footsteps in the snow. Is that life finished? Perhaps hundreds of years later, some archaeologist or fisherman or a child on a beach in  might discover an icy casket, creating international news, taking on a new life of its own.

Yesterday morning, I took a walk around the reservoir near our home in Bedford with Noi, my dog, a three-year-old golden doodle. We saw a pair of ducks, a male and female, swimming along content to be alone together in the late fall. Then we came across a Great Blue Heron standing still at the water’s edge. It was early morning and we were alone and none of us moved. Disty has told me that she thinks Andy has come back as a Great Blue Heron, and I looked for signs that he understood that I recognized him. What if this sort of rebirth is true, and we are forever being reborn to other life forms. The never-ending cycle of rebirthing, the pain of samsara, caused Buddha to seek Enlightenment and forever be released from the unfinishing life. With Andy standing there, I think that being completely finished is neither possible nor desirable in our lives.

We can only put one foot in front of the other. March forth. Carry the flag. Practice love. Put a brick in a place and hope it will carry a soul to eternity. (To be continued…)