Morning Thoughts

Morning thoughts. It's a lovely cliche ingrained into our culture to "live like you'll die tomorrow", and certain experiences from the last year have really heightened this realisation in me, of "this moment is fleeting, it will be gone soon, and so will they and so will I."

But I'm not sure anymore if it's helping me to live better. Instead, I feel this huge cloud of worry that I'm not appreciating the moment enough, especially in times of sadness and pain, and every joy is tinged with the reality of it being held in the hands of entropy, and it's actually pretty hard work to be able to step out of the moment with your family, your cat, your friends, and look at the same moment being held in death's hand, and feel joyous about it.

So, I've decided, instead of living like I will die tomorrow, I am going to live like I will live forever, and that entropy will never take my loves, but also with the knowledge that the moment is still fleeting, the moment is still good.

Death is a different beast from other loss, I've learned. I was a pro at taking life's curveballs and enjoying them and rolling with them. This is an entirely different beast, and I draw words from Washington Irving to justify my resistance to "moving on" from this.

"The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul."

On this day 1 year ago, we fell into each others' arms. I knew I would adore him for a lifetime, whether only as friends, or strangers in passing, and to be given the opportunity to love him was a wonderful wave life offered me to catch. I took it, and I'd take it again and again and again. I have to catch other waves now, too. But that wave... that will always be the first time the sea took me into it's arms, and I felt at home, and I felt at one, and I learned the capacity for good life held - if you're willing to ride the wave. How can I turn away from a life, that in the same breath, gave me him? As much as I lament that I am here living in his absence, and that it comes so naturally, I must harness this and use it to push me to live and live and live with joy. To not only catch the other waves that will come, but to be willing to die for them, to sing and scream and let my mind throb with delight on them. Not to sit on them softly, waiting for them to end.