We try to run from the poignancy at the heart of existence into plans, project, fantasies, worries, regrets, and images of serenity and peace. Or we try to perfect it, ‘tweak’ it somehow. But it is already perfect, in that it transcends any concept we would have of it. If we must have a project, we can appreciate the mystery of existence without trying to resolve it into a specific feeling or understanding we will then articulate, control and repeat.

We then experience a predictable sense of excitement when we get close to something we want, and a predictable feeling of disdain when we feel a situation we want nothing to do with coming on. Caught in fantasies which support our preferred identities, we also shut off a good portion of our actual experience. A good portion of our lives, (let’s say 90%, just to be dramatic), don’t register at all. And then we feel cut-off from life as if we are living behind a pane of glass.

There is no greater feeling, state, or condition that we have to achieve. There is no lesser or more limited feeling, state, or condition that we have to be liberated from. This is it.

The reason our occasional, alienating thoughts and feelings bother us is because we think we should be bothered by them.

We can not get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, which would steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.

If I were to hold on to a fantasy indefinitely, it would become more and more empty, repetitive, and stagnant. But despite its obvious shortcomings, I could hold on to it. These reflections bring us to an understanding of what poignancy is, and why experience is suffused with this sublime yet bittersweet feeling. Living experience is poignant because it is composed of ‘can’t hold on.’