There is more ache in life now, more poignancy in the eyes of a beloved, more pouring out of the hridayam.

While it’s true that years of deep daily meditation will make you calmer, it’s truer to say that it will crack you open. Like an egg. Thump! Deep and wide. You can hear and feeling the splitting open, I tell you, and here everything comes running, gliding, dripping out. Just like that. Sweet and warm, so viscous and sticky.

You see because the encrustations and the filters, the means of maintaining separation all start to go. And then what’s left? This heart-open sensitivity. More, on behalf of others, becomes cry-worthy.

It’s like growing new feelers. Like tuning into a totally different, subtler channel. Because all this was already here before, but now it’s disclosed without being spoken of.

Almost everybody, save for those enlightened beings, is suffering in some way or another, and that suffering, more and more, becomes evident, available, in a way on display for you. In this breath, the intimation of death. In the next one, beauties more beautiful, flowers more perfect, trees in need of care.

My wife tells me that I’m becoming funnier. “I told you I was funny!,” I reply jokingly. It only took me 10 years to make my case. They say the key to marriage is patience.

Life, amid the life-aches, beats on with greater simplicity and intensity, its ever-present immediacy. “Look at me,” it says. “I’m just about to…” “Just about to what?” “Look and see.”

I do.