Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World

Essayist Slater debuts with a rich and freewheeling meditation on life, death, and impermanence. She centers her account around The Tibetan Book of the Dead, an eighth-century text that provides a postmortem road map for dead souls but can, the author contends, also help readers grapple with the finitude of life through its emphasis on embracing impermanence. To this end, she provides manageable suggestions like observing and accepting small, everyday endings—to a conversation, a meeting, or a weekend—and actively grounding oneself in the present rather than following the “monkey mind” between past and future, which sidetracks the brain into a shallower form of existence. While such lessons aren’t especially new, the author interweaves vivid memoiristic sections on encountering The Tibetan Book of the Dead during her grandmother’s funerary rites, meditations on Buddhist culture, and expansive explorations of the notion of impermanence and ambiguity, including in relationship to her own identity (“Looking back now at that time, I realize that, from a young age, I hadn’t been able to see my liminality, my racial and cultural heritage, as a gift”). The result is an intriguing and creative reframing of ancient Buddhist wisdom. (Sept.)