As the sun breaks through on a foggy morning

I offered to erase the white board.

"There is something calming when I wipe it clean," he said while offering to do it.

"It is like the Buddhist monks and their mandala," I replied as I slowly moved the eraser up and down and from side to side.  A reminder that "we are transients who merely rent a piece of real estate for a while."

"You truly believe that?"

"Yep.  Have believed that for a long time."

"Maybe because you were lucky to have been born in India.  I wish I had been born in India."

"Me too," was the echo from a long blond-haired young man who was reaching for the drinking water fountain.

We looked at each other and smiled.

Perhaps the accident of being born into a Hindu brahmin family that was religious and orthodox is the reason that I became so convinced over the years in my belief that we came from nothing and into nothing that we will be transformed.  If so, it was a lucky accident.  One of the many dumb lucks in life.

In my early years, I struggled with trying to understand from where we came to be, and whatever happens after we die. It was a struggle. Anxiety-ridden.  And then like the sun slowly burning up the fog, a realization eased the anxiety about birth and death.  A realization that those bookmarks are irrelevant.  The only thing that matters is the here and the now.

In this here and now, I hope I am drawing a good enough mandala.