Your life is a highlight
reel: a gradual search for a handful of memories. We like to think that every
moment has potential, that there’s something transcendent, hidden all around,
that if you would only stop to seize the day, you could hold onto it and carry
it with you. But the truth is, most of life is forgotten instantly, almost as
it’s happening. Chances are that even a day like today will slip through your
fingers and dissolve into oblivion, washed clean by the tides.
This is the rhythm of ordinary time: the featureless stretches between one memory and the next, the thousand acts of maintenance you do every day. You keep your body going, hauling it back and forth from one place to the next. You breathe in and out. Things fall apart, you clean up the mess. And it all washes away in the night, to be built up again in the morning. You throw the week against the wall to see what sticks, hoping you will remember something that happened today, anything.
Most of our lives are spent in the wilderness, those areas we fly over to get to the good parts. And you wonder how you could spend so much time just pushing back against the current, trying to keep your small boat afloat, watching for a glimmer on the horizon, waiting for those moments when you can finally say, “I’ve found it!”
But it’s all happening. It’s all real whether you’ll remember it or not. So you might as well say "I've lost it!" As if to mark the passage of yet another opportunity, flushed down the hourglass. A final toast to the endless forgotten days, whose humble labor has given you everything you have, at least for the moment.
As the song says: long live the high tide and long live the low, but above all, long live the difference.
This is the rhythm of ordinary time: the featureless stretches between one memory and the next, the thousand acts of maintenance you do every day. You keep your body going, hauling it back and forth from one place to the next. You breathe in and out. Things fall apart, you clean up the mess. And it all washes away in the night, to be built up again in the morning. You throw the week against the wall to see what sticks, hoping you will remember something that happened today, anything.
Most of our lives are spent in the wilderness, those areas we fly over to get to the good parts. And you wonder how you could spend so much time just pushing back against the current, trying to keep your small boat afloat, watching for a glimmer on the horizon, waiting for those moments when you can finally say, “I’ve found it!”
But it’s all happening. It’s all real whether you’ll remember it or not. So you might as well say "I've lost it!" As if to mark the passage of yet another opportunity, flushed down the hourglass. A final toast to the endless forgotten days, whose humble labor has given you everything you have, at least for the moment.
As the song says: long live the high tide and long live the low, but above all, long live the difference.
TJ
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