“Now we should live while the pulse of life is strong, life is a tenuous thing… fragile, fleeting; don’t wait for tomorrow – Be here now. Be here now. Be here now!”
(J.S. Eldredge, 2005)
I was facilitating a training at work this evening when the girls remembered the video I showed them 2 weeks ago on “Killing Time”. Now as I watched it the second time, it reminded me of a video I watched almost three years ago, when I was contemplating the mystery of time and how it puts us in a state of either ‘sadness’ or ‘ecstasy’.
It brought back that pang of disturbance, that feeling of deep sorrow caused by the knowledge that everything has an end, anyway.
“All these trees, all these plants, all this life is going to decay. Everything dissolves in meaninglessness when you think about the fact that impermanence is a really real thing. Perhaps the greatest existential bummer of all is entropy.” (Silva, 2013)
It was also a couple of days ago when a friend introduced this phrase she had on her postcard: “C’est toute bonne chose a une fin”… All good things have an end. And it was sad. Just what Rilke felt when he saw the beauty of nature when he was walking with Freud and it said:
“He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.” (Freud, 1915)
It was sad to think that what you experience now will eventually end, to see beauty transform into nothingness, to realize that connections made will eventually break, as life catches up and put “busy” in the middle.
But how does one respond to this?
“Do we love harder? Do we squeeze tighter? Or do we embrace the Buddhist creed of no attachment? Do we pretend not to care that everything and everyone we know is going to be taken away from us? And I don’t know if I can accept that.” (Silva, 2013)
I guess the idea that everything has an end will give us the perspective to ‘enjoy every minute’, to ‘fully give everything’, to ‘relish’ the moment as if it’s the only time we will ever experience it.
It gives us more reason to be in the moment and bask in the beauty of things. To take it all in. To see the beauty of nature and life as if it’s the only moment given. To look at the person we love with so much intensity and attention, to see all the details, to be there. To be here. Now.
Take it all in.
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.”
Lou x Raine 