When I was ten, I made the catastrophic decision to watch an ABC Movie of the Week called The Screaming Woman, based on a Ray Bradbury short story. The premise was simple: a woman buried alive, screaming for help. But to a ten-year-old with an overactive imagination, it was psychological napalm. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep. Every creak of the floorboards, every gust of wind was the muffled plea of a mud-caked corpse clawing her way out from under my bed.
One night, trembling in a sweat-damp cocoon of sheets, I turned to my imaginary Zen tormentor, Master Po, and asked, “Why am I so stupid, Master? Why did I watch a movie designed to murder my sleep?”
“Ah, Grasshopper,” he said, with the unhurried calm of someone who’s never paid a utility bill, “the woman buried in a shallow grave is not your enemy. She is your teacher. She shows you the short bridge between life and death. You imagine the bridge as long, but in truth it is a nub, barely the length of a thought. Horror films remind you that you are always one bad turn from the dirt nap.”
“That’s profound, Master, but I still can’t sleep.”
“You mustn’t flee from the woman under your bed,” he said. “You must reach into the grave and pull her out. In saving her, you save yourself.”
“I’m not going near a grave,” I said. “I have claustrophobia.”
“Life and death,” he replied, “are the same thing seen from opposite sides of the same coin.”
“I prefer the life side, thank you.”
“You cling to your vantage point because you think it’s fixed,” he said, with the patience of a man lecturing a doorknob. “But it will shift. When you accept change, death will no longer frighten you—and once that fear is gone, nothing can stop you.”
“Nothing? Like I could hit a baseball five hundred feet like Reggie Jackson?”
Master Po sighed. “No, Grasshopper. You will stop wanting to be Reggie Jackson. And that will be your home run.”
Cinemorphosis 
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