The best I can come up with is this: The experience is its own reward. We are in it for the experience of having done it. And the experience comes down to realization. Realization is knowing. Learning is not knowing. Realizing is knowing. We can be taught to learn. We cannot be taught to realize. Realization/comprehension is knowing. But it cannot be taught. “The tao that can be said/taught is not the eternal tao.” So, “the whole point.” “What it’s all about.” Is realizing, knowing. And the only way we realize/know is through contemplating experience, experiencing experience, meditating on experience. Knowing what it means to be alive is what being alive is about. For what purpose? There is no purpose beyond knowing what it is/means to be alive. We live for the realization of the experience of having lived.

My sister, Susan Dollar, committed suicide by starving herself to death under hospice care. She was a brilliant human being who got it, and who had enough. And life held nothing else for her. And the effort, the trouble involved, to continue living was not worth it for her. “It is only more of the same and it isn’t getting any better. It is only getting worse. Why go on with it?” I am putting those words in her mouth. I am imagining that is what she would have said. It is what I would say in her place, but I am living in my place, and my place is still worth it to me because I interpret my place to be that of a witness. I see, experience, know, realize, understand my place too be saying what’s what on the chance that others can benefit from my realization, and come to terms with their own life experience in such a way that allows them to be a source of comfort, help, encouragement for those who are also grappling with “What’s It All About?”

We help one another all along the way to the point of being exhausted by the work involved in staying alive, and then either taking their own life or continuing to live in the service of being an aid to others in the work of realization, knowing, understanding what’s what and what it is all about and being an aid and encouragement for others along the Way. But once you understand the Way to be what it is, you are either glad to die or glad to help others to live until they are glad to die. I am not going to take my own life, but I will be glad to die when I die. And I wish Susan had made that choice, but I understand that her life was a burden–not that it was any more difficult than anyone’s life, but that it was difficult for her beyond measure, just because of her personality and the way she responded to her experience of being alive. Once she got it, she didn’t need to go on getting it.