In the monastery where I lived, death was a daily practice.
I was eighteen years old when I began practicing this way.
I had no idea it would one day teach me to be married.
Each morning I sat down and reflected on the simple fact that I would die. That the monks beside me would die. That the teacher at the front of the hall — upright, unshakable — would die. Even the hall itself, with its incense and bells and cool tile floor, would one day be gone.
Few things clarify like that. When death is held steadily in attention, what doesn’t matter falls away. What remains becomes vivid, immediate, quietly luminous: a bowl of rice, the chill of the hall before dawn, the particular silence just after a bell rings.
The Buddha taught this practice as a path to appamada: the urgency and wakefulness that make real transformation possible. You contemplate death in order to finally arrive in your life.
***
For years the practice did its quiet work. Then, on the morning of my thirtieth birthday, something broke open.
I woke in the early winter dark, put on my robes, and walked to the meditation hall. Something hovered at the edges of my awareness — a presence, a weight I couldn’t name. I sat with the other monks in silence, sensing it drawing closer. When we finally filed out into the cold mountain air after meditation, it hit me.
Thirty years old. If I was lucky, a third of the way through my life. But experientially, not even that — I could already feel time accelerating, each year passing faster than the one before. The numbers didn’t matter. What mattered was the gut-level certainty, arriving not as a thought but as a physical fact: I was going to die. Nobody could tell me when, but it no longer felt abstract.
I had been contemplating death for years. I thought I understood what it meant. I didn’t.
For weeks afterward I was undone, disoriented, almost physically stumbling through my days. Gradually the recognition condensed into a single phrase: no time to lose. I began looking at my life very carefully. Was I living the way I wanted? If I died tomorrow, would I be satisfied?
On most counts, yes. But there was one place I felt queasy. For years I had been unable to commit. Not to the monastery, not to relationships, not to anything that required the full weight of my presence. The practice had shown me my life would end. I couldn’t keep living halfway.
Six months later, Devon walked through the monastery gate.
***
At one point the Buddha gathered his monks and asked them a direct question about maraṇasati, mindfulness of death: how do you practice it?
The monks answered one by one.
One monk said: I reflect that I might live for a day and a night. That would be enough time to attend to the Buddha’s teaching.
The Buddha replied: negligent.
Another said: I reflect that I might live for a single day.
Negligent.
Another: for the time it takes to eat a meal.
Still negligent.
Another: for the time it takes to chew and swallow a single mouthful of food.
Still negligent.
Finally, a monk said: I reflect that I might live for the time of one in-breath and one out-breath.
This, the Buddha said, is mindfulness of death practiced with diligence.
What strikes me about this teaching from the Anguttara Nikaya is not its austerity but its precision. The Buddha is not cultivating despair. He is not asking his monks to dwell in morbidity or rehearse grief. He is sharpening attention down to a single breath.
One breath. That’s all we ever have.
Which means this breath, the one happening right now, is the only place practice can actually occur.
The Buddha goes on to make the point even more explicit. The purpose of this reflection, he says, is appamada: wakefulness, non-negligence, the careful attention without which liberation is impossible. You contemplate death not to flee your life but to stop sleepwalking through it.
***
Devon and I have been together for nearly twenty years. We have been practicing, teaching, and arguing about closet space ever since.
A meditation retreat offers clear conditions: silence, structure, a teacher, a bell. Partnership offers dishes, scheduling conflicts, the lights your beloved leaves on in every room. We practice inside the mess.
The longer you live with someone, the easier it becomes to stop seeing them. Familiarity is its own kind of sleep. You know their habits, their complaints, the way they tell a story. You think you know what they’re going to say before they say it. And somewhere in that knowing, the person themselves can disappear.
When death is close in our awareness, the small frictions of a shared life loosen their grip. What comes into focus instead is the preciousness of the person in front of you, the irretrievability of this moment, the simple fact that one day — no one can tell you when — this will all be gone.
Devon and I were staying at Spirit Rock Meditation Center not so long ago. She was teaching a retreat, I was writing a draft of our second book. We were sharing a very small room, the kind meant for one person, because teachers don’t usually bring their partners along.
Devon is not a minimalist. Everywhere I looked, her things: three teacups, an eye mask, a metal thermos, headphones, pajamas draped over the back of a chair, a jacket thrown across the bed next to the printed pages of tonight’s dharma talk. She had brought a blender. A blender. For protein shakes.
I travel with two pairs of pants and two sweatshirts. The closet was entirely hers.
I could feel the irritation rising, small, slightly embarrassing. The kind you know you shouldn’t feel and feel anyway.
Then I remembered.
Devon is going to die. I am going to die. This particular arrangement of teacups and exasperation is as impermanent as a California winter. One day — I don’t know when — I will walk through a room that has none of her things in it. No blender. No jacket on the bed. Nothing but the absence of her, which will be insupportable.
The irritation didn’t get managed or reasoned away. It simply dissolved. What remained was something closer to tenderness. The room hadn’t changed, Devon hadn’t changed. Something in me had opened.
One breath. That’s all you can count on.
Which means this breath in this room, with this partner, and this blender, is the only place practice can actually occur.
***
Appamada is often translated as urgency. But this isn’t the urgency of panic or striving. It’s the urgency of someone who has finally understood their situation.
The situation is simple: we are going to die. The people we love are going to die. This person, this room, this moment of friction, tenderness, even boredom — will not come again.
We know this intellectually. The practice is learning to know it in the body, in real time, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. Not on a cushion in a meditation hall, with a bell and a teacher and the clean conditions of retreat. In a small room at Spirit Rock with a blender on the desk.
In all the unnoticed moments where love is actually practiced.
Appamada doesn’t make partnership easier. It makes it more vivid. The frictions don’t disappear, but they loosen their grip because something else comes into focus: the irreplaceable fact of this person, this life, this breath.
No time to lose.
