This is how I appear in a roleplaying game, but not in real life. I guess that was a bit unrealistic. 

See, this is my longing ideal, my highest aspiration, I guess. To become an incarnation of brightness, to protect the innocent and keep the darkness at bay. But in real life, it is not that easy at all.

In the emergency room, when the second wave of the unidentified illness was rising in my body, when there was nothing I could do and I did not know what was happening, I started to worry. Well, in a way I started to worry before I called the emergency number in the first place, but it was more a kind of caution. They had asked me to call that number if it happened again, after all. But it was only between a quarter and half an hour later, as I was shaking and my heart was racing even while sitting in my outer jacket and a quilt-like thing over that again, that I began to think this might be the end.

I did not want to die. I think that is a fairly reasonable attitude, for someone younger than 80 and without grievous pain or sorrow, at least unless one dies for some great and noble purpose. Blood poisoning, as I suspected at the time, is not a great and noble thing. (I still don’t know what it actually was, and I can speculate on that elsewhere.) But the thing is, this went a bit beyond that reasonable attitude. I began to fear. What next?

If the materialists were right and death was the end of me, I would resent it, but that is pretty much it. I had my rough patches when I grew up and did not understand the Laws of the Mind, but most of my life has been a very good one. Should it end now, and my own joy and pain were the only things to be weighed, I would definitely have pulled the longest straw, as we say around here. He who dies with the most happiness wins, in which case I would at least qualify for honorable mention, I like to think. There has been a lot of singing (albeit severely out of tune) in the last three decades. Long may it last!

But if death was not the end, but rather the beginning, there was more reason to worry, I felt. If I were to be weighed not in the happiness received but in the happiness given, I was not too optimistic about my fate. And if I were to travel through the astral realm on my way from this world, would I be able to pass through it without being held back by claims to my soul? Would attachments snare me and pull me down? Would I fall to the Darkness? As I sat there, shaking with cold and weakness, I did not shine. I was not the one who cold help others, but had to impose on others to help me. I was painfully aware of that.

I tried to be considerate and express my gratitude to the nurse and doctor who hooked me up to various measuring devices. Thinking that this might be my last opportunity to bless others, I tried (without acting too strange). I entered a meditative state in order to calm the shaking of my body, to make their job easier. (Although I did not manage to maintain it while talking.) But I was not shining brightly. I was not a hero. I was just a weak and somewhat scared human. If I were to die there, neither those in this world nor those watching from the other world would find reason to celebrate the way of my transition, that is quite certain.

It is not so easy to be a hero in real life. But for now, I live. Perhaps I shall do so for a long time, or perhaps not. I wish to shine brighter. There are other things I wish as well, like eat delicious prune yogurt. But my highest aspiration, I think, is to shine brightly. To radiate blessing so that people can feel better simply by being around me. That may take its sweet time as things are these days. By my estimate, which may be overly optimistic, I am still two dimensions shy of being what the Japanese call a “nyorai”, an incarnation of compassion.  Someone who radiates blessing, whose mere existence in this world and this age is a blessing to those now alive and those who will come later. There are people like that. But I am far from it yet.

For now, I need to set realistic goals, in so far as it is realistic to set goals when we don’t know the day tomorrow. But even the grandest castle is built stony by stone, and even should it end up just being a small piece of wall made of a few stones, perhaps someday someone will find shelter behind it.