Life Writing
I am worried and frustrated that all I do is write in platitudes, and that the quality of my prose has stagnated at “barely mediocre” for the past 5 years. When ideas are flowing from my brain to the keyboard most naturally, I still seem to lose their essence and elegance during editing. (Or, I lose them completely when the browser crashes. I’ve got to stop composing in the browser.) Although I have done nothing to fight against these concerns, I continue to write here, hoping that I can break through to the next level of writing quality. Focused practice seems to be the only way to advance, and the stagnation in my writing quality has correlated directly with what can only be described as years of literary dilettantism. I will keep practicing, starting here:
During the quiet moments of my day, when the mechanics of life have briefly faded, and I’m left with my thoughts, I’ve lately been returning to the preciousness, the fragility, of our health. Humans aren’t just vulnerable to cancers, diseases, infections, but also to falls, collisions, lacerations. And so, all of our future moments grow from each moment of now. The manifold ways we may go are unimaginably varied, some spectacular and some monstrous. I wouldn’t trade this free will for any assurance of future safety, but lately I find my self acutely aware that lives don’t simply sometimes hang by a thread, but they are woven from them, each one fragile and each one finite.
This should be a sad thing, right? That no future is certain, that no life is infinite, that no thing must follow from another? I haven’t seen it that way. Being human, I do not have the capability to live every moment in the awe that should accompany the amazing realities of life, or this place, but I am now reminded to feel and to try to understand the preciousness of each beat of my heart.
That somewhere there is a clock ticking shouldn’t cause us to lament time lost, but to redouble our efforts to draw everything we can from each hour.
“What’s the greatest day in the history of the world? Today.”