In Massachusetts, if you do not return your library books, you can go to jail. (Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 266 sections 99a and 100.)

 

A wide variety of personal choices is tolerated and even encouraged by the Commonwealth. But clinging to your library books past their due date is not one of them. You may have forgotten. You may have become accustomed to their presence on your shelves. You may be busy or lazy or possessive or forgetful, but the harder you hold on to them, the more vigorously they will be removed from your grasp.

 

Most people let go of their books in plenty of time. Willingly bringing them back so other people can enjoy the books, we can avoid the fines and the tart librarian.

 

And why hang on to them, anyway? They take up space, we already read them, and if civic virtue and social sanction aren’t motivation enough, there is always the bedrock of self interest.

 

Which is a good dharma lesson for us, because everything we have — whether James Patterson, Shakespeare, Milton or the Bible — it’s going to come due, and it’s going to be returned.

 

Everything we have is borrowed. Whether we love it or loathe it, protect it or neglect it, we will be separated from it sooner or later.

 

Our bodies will be returned. We slipped through a narrow opening into life, and we may walk upon the earth proud and powerful, but no matter what we think along the way, that body will slip back through another portal, briefly opened, into death. Someone else will borrow it. It will be food, molecules, memories for others.

 

Our clothes, our house, our car, our tools, our friends and family, our rank and position, our achievements and regrets, all the scripts that form the volumes of our life, will be returned. They are on loan to us, and no matter how accustomed to their presence we are, they are not ours. 

 

This process of separation is a source of unimaginable suffering if we are not prepared.  This suffering is commonplace. But it is not inevitable. The way to avoid it is offered to us through practice. The tighter we cling to the components of our lives, the more we hold to the mistake of their permanence, the more we suffer.

 

The more we are accustomed to practice, to behaving decently toward ourselves and others, to developing a calm, clear mind that does not project or linger, the more we

cultivate the wisdom to see the fundamental dharma teaching that all things that have been assembled from parts – our bodies, our minds, our lives – will eventually be disassembled, the more suffering will cease and an opportunity to achieve great things will arise in its place.

 

So we can borrow our wonderful or terrible stories. We can read them, explore them, learn from them, live them out, take care of them, ignore them or revile them. We can make them our own for a while. But eventually, we will have to return them. And if we do not do so willingly, with wisdom, they – and we – will be taken away by force. 

 

The monk meditating at midnight, with nothing to his name but a robe, a bowl and the moonlight, is an image we might view with sentimental yearning, like a lifestyle piece in Real Simple magazine. Or we might see it as unimaginably impoverished — a life defined by deficiency — a life without a sweetheart, the internet, friends, stuff to do, or a cool job. 

 

There is another way to see it. That monk is not so different from those of us who live our lives in other ways. Only he is focused on doing the work he needs to do – not by neglecting the important things of this life, but by putting them in context of eternity, where everything will be returned, and our choice is not between pastimes or genres, but between imprisonment or freedom.