I thought, okay, there's been no theme to my posts these days, why don't I pick a theme and put in something?
I chose "Brevity of Life", I don't know why, but I felt like that. Tell me whether this is good or not.
There are good quotes on the short life at
Meanings of Life.I liked this:
Our existence is a short circuit of light between two eternities of darkness.
-Vladimir Nabokov.
If you feel this is too bleak, read this:
Time is a violent torrent; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by, and another takes its place, before this too will be swept away.
-Marcus Aurelius.
That is for starters.
This is dismal- but if you like all that, you will like this:
"The brevity of life, the failing of the senses, the numbness of indifference and unprofitable occupations allow us to know very little. And again and again swift oblivion, the thief of knowledge and the enemy of memory, makes a void of the mind, in the course of time, even what we learn we lose.
–Nicholas Copernicus, fragmentary scrap found among his papers (ca. 1540)"
I found this at
Harper's Magazine.
I don't know why you should go on reading this, but may be that is because we are all aware that life is not so permanent- things can get different, quick, and radically different.
Pandahat has a shocker of bad news in her blog:
today i heard some bad news and its made me realise how precious life is.
katherine-big cuz/fave cuz/my mentor/my hero/my big sis i never had- has got breast cancer.
im absolutely gutted.i cant believe it-speaking to her was torture-i tried to be strong for her but lost it and we both ended up crying. she was more worried about upsetting me that thinking about herself. typical kath.i just cant imagine the ocean of emotions-the heartache-the treatment that is to come.im gonna try and be there for her 100%
and cathy_bythesea in her blog,
Midlife Mysteries, is put into a contemplative mood, and meditates on the brevity of life, when she gets a text, "Francis M passed away at 12 noon today.":
This is the third death that my husband H and I have encountered over the last couple of days. Yesterday, his classmate Monch passed away from a stroke, gone at 55. They had just been together a week before at a merienda for their classmate Don Rodis. "I remember what he wore, he was in bright red t-shirt with "Kiwanis" emblazoned on it." H said yesterday when he told me that Monch had just died.
This morning, a provincemate of H's, who is the uncle of a dear friend of mine from college was gone at 58 from complications arising from diabetes.
A few hours later, it was Francis M. Gone at 44. We share the same birth month and year and so when someone that close in age to you just died, you cannot help but ponder the brevity of life.
You will never know when you will go. Look at Amiel Alcantara. One moment he is walking in a parking lot, sandwich in hand, strolling with his siblings. A few minutes later, his very life is snuffed out of him, just like that.
And so we must always remember to always live well, and love well. It's useless bearing grudges, or not being able to forgive. Let go and live each day in peace and love. Spend time with your loved ones. When you part, never part in anger. In doing so, you do not live with regret. Regret is a sad thing to have when you are on your death bed or when a loved one suddenly passes away.
And,
Genny:Last Wednesday, when I was out watering flowers in our front yard, I slipped on the wet concrete and fell.
And broke my arm.
It was the first broken bone I’ve ever had. And, aside from the pain and the inconvenience of it, the experience was a good reminder of how fast things can happen in life.
And how quickly things can change.
She draws the right lessons:
So even though I'm a lot slower with this cast on my arm, and it's harder to get things done, I'm appreciating the little things more than I did before.
Things like my left arm that's not broken.
And my husband blow-drying my hair for me.
And sitting in bed next to my daughter while she holds a book up and we read together.
And the sweet way my son says, "I'm so sorry Mom," whenever he looks at my cast.
Instead of “bustling about” and spending our time on things that don’t matter, it’s good to be reminded what a gift this life is. And how God wants us to use it–appreciating each moment and loving others the best that we can.
The sort of short life that bugs us ordinary people is not the kind that bugs the philosophically minded.
For
The Maverick Philosopher writes,
Fundamentally, the problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. Let me try to make this clear.
For the person I am calling the seeker, the problem is not that our days are few in number, a problem that could be solved by having more of them, but that each day, each hour, each minute is defective in its mode of being, so that even an endless supply of days would not solve the problem. The problem is that the world of change is a scene of unreality. Desire seeks a satisfaction it cannot find in any transient object so that piling one finite satisfaction upon another does nothing to yield true satisfaction.
I am inclined to agree with him and pit myself against all the worldlings, but then, when I looked up at
Pandahat's blog to know what happened to her cousin, I found,
had a text from katherine when i finished saying that her lymph nodes were clear and although her cancer was 3rd grade the tumor removal was successful. such a relief-felt like i was walking on air and then felt really emotional (in primark) her fundraising thing has gone up to over 1000 already-its unbelievable.just want to stay by her side to get through the chemo and look forward to the day when she can carry life on as normal-day at a time though.
This is what we want of life- the feel-good factor.
Life should be worth something more than the feel-good and feel-related parts, brief or not, but I don't know what this is.
At least this post is not a short one- that is a relief. Or is it an Alas, Poor Yorick!
Let me know whether it bugs you to think that life is so short and so unpredictable- and whether we should enjoy it as much as we can, every detail of it, living in the moment and so on, or decide that it is impossible as long as day turns to night- so we should find what is permanent amidst all this transience and having come to the end of our seeking, get to be happy forever.
But it is possible that there is no choice, actually:
So there I am, walking home late one evening after what has been a long and arduous day. For much of the day I have been sitting in meetings, talking over cups of coffee, and wrestling with ideas and thoughts and words and all the other things I spend my days wrestling with. But now, as I walk through the evening light – this is a couple of days ago, just before midsummer, and although it is late, the darkness has not yet fallen – I see a blackbird up in a tree, belting out a song, and I stop dead in my tracks. I don’t know enough about the politics of birds to know what it is singing about – whether it is yelling “Get off my land!” or whether it has (and this, I know, is more controversial) just had the thought, somewhere in it’s blackbird brain, “Oh, look, it’s a nice evening… What the hell, I’ll just have a little warble whilst I’m sitting here…” Either way, it is simply beautiful. And for a moment, as I listen to the bird, I find that I have no thought in my head about the comings and goings of the day. The bird is silhouetted against the evening sky; its song cuts through all of the clamour of the day. And the beauty of it all is breathtaking.
-Will Buckingham.
I suppose it is ultimately about attention, awareness, feeling alive.
Let me know your thoughts on this impermanence thing, though, and what we should do about that.
