Short Thoughts about Short Life
Writers often wax poetic about the brevity of life. For me, there are moments in the stillness of my day where the concept of time and my space in it seem as vastly incongruent as a flea trying to hitch a ride on a blue whale.
I worry about significance, worth, and the gum that gets stuck to my shoe while walking to the library.
Fireworks on the 4th of July are brief, but send millions of people into raptures.
Butterflies, from beginning to end, span the vast time of a month or a year, and yet they're the subject of countless photos, poems, and metaphors.
We build structures a thousand times bigger than ourselves and throw rocks into a river a thousand times older than ourselves. We exist in a time frame ineffably longer than ourselves.
"I learned a long time ago... that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something." From "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok
Love triangles, divorce, infidelity and 70 year wedding anniversaries, laughter, and murders, tsunamis and birthdays, hate from strangers or hugs from friends, the music of birds in a tree and tornado sirens, a symphony by Bach and cacophony of bombs falling in war, designer dresses and bare feet of poverty, a flower and the rotting carcass of roadkill- squished together in the same breath that we call our life. No wonder we have a hard time understanding what it means.
Eat and drink, for we may perchance die in 5 minutes, let alone tomorrow.
In such a jumble, who has time to stop and figure out how to feel about it? Quick! Live faster, fuller, busier! No time to smell the roses when you're racing down the highway with exhaust clouding your senses. And then the trip is over before you've had a chance to see where exactly you're heading, or why you're driving in the first place.
Right now, I'm sad and confused, happy, excited, contemplative, full from dinner, my eyes are straining in the dim light of my living room, a stranger and I awkwardly met eyes when he walked by my apartment and glanced in my window as I heard his footsteps and looked up at the same time. I'm warm from this summery day with a tolerable breeze coming in through the windows, and my head is full of eternity and frailty. My friend said she liked the orange in my living room the other day, which made me like her more, especially when she imagined that the sun in the morning would make the room glow, which is exactly what I enjoy about it most. I had lunch with an array of friends today, and we talked while munching on a bounty of vegetables and fruit, and planned an excursion around town with the goal to pretend we're visiting Europe. My mom and I talked on the phone and I texted my sisters and took a long nap from which I woke and continued to lay in bed staring at the room until the light of day dimmed into night.
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