Hello, you are listening to the secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 14. I am your host Noah Rasheda and today I'm talking about the journey of life.

Hey guys, I'm excited to be recording this podcast episode this week. It's been difficult for me because I'm traveling this week and next week.

I'm in Hong Kong and in Beijing attending trade shows and I'm trying to find the right time to be able to record a podcast episode.

It's been hard to prepare. It's been hard to feel like I'm completely awake because it's opposite of the time that I'm used to.

I'm not used to. My body is thinking I'm supposed to be asleep but I'm really awake and it's made it for an interesting experience to try to have the clarity of mind to convey what I'm trying to convey in a podcast episode.

This may be shorter than normal podcast episodes but what I really wanted to discuss quickly was just the analogy of life, the journey of life and what that experience is when compared to the story of flying over here.

On my way here when I got on the plane, the lady I was sitting next to right away said, man this is a crappy airplane and I kind of paused for a minute because I was thinking, what is she talking about? Why is this crappy?

And then she went on to tell me the last flight I was on had every chair had its own personal screen and this one didn't have that. It was an older plane and as she was explaining everything and telling me how unhappy she was about being on this flight.

It occurred to me to tell her something that she must have not known which is that you don't need your own screen anymore.

You have a tablet or a smartphone, you just log into the Wi-Fi and there you have the whole system access to movies and videos and everything directly on your personal device.

So I explained that to her and showed her how to log into the Wi-Fi on the airplane and then she was all smiles and enjoying her trip once again because suddenly she had gained knowledge that made the experience different for her and I thought, man there's got to be a lesson in that.

So we go through life on the crappy plane, maybe the right knowledge will help us realize, oh this actually isn't as bad as I thought.

So I had that in mind throughout the rest of the flight and I kept drawing lessons from the experience that had been on the flight and I thought, isn't life a lot like this journey where we start at one point and we all end at the same point.

We start with life and we end with death, at least the experience that we're having in the present moment, that's how we know that it starts and ends and that's all we know.

What we know that we have right now is just the present moment and throughout the entire flight I kept thinking about that.

I would look at the clock and in this case I knew how much more time I had. I knew that there were four hours left, six hours left, 12 hours left, it was a 14 hour flight and I kept thinking but all I really know is that what I have is just what I have at this specific moment and at one point on the trip there was turbulence and the plane kind of starts shaking and thinking, oh I hope it's not like this the whole time.

But there's no guarantee it could have been like that for in the moment I started experiencing this turbulence thinking this could be like this for the next five hours.

I was like, oh that would be horrible and I kept thinking, but that's what we do in life right turbulent times come up and we're thinking, oh great that's it.

Life's going to suck forever and and it doesn't then it stops and when it stops I have no indication of whether or not there will be turbulence again.

And if it's going to be the same or worse than it was last time, that's all part of the journey that you're just going through it waiting to figure it out and see what's going to happen next.

And then on the flight looking around I thought how interesting there are people who have an entirely different experience of this whole ordeal.

Some people up in first class their chairs turn into beds and they were flying with you know they're asleep and they're enjoying the flight way more than those of us in the back.

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