I have noticed that many people go through life much as one might pass through a foggy field at dusk; head lowered, steps mechanical, muttering to oneself about the damp. They exist, yes. They awaken in the morning and pull on their shoes. They mindlessly discuss the weather and taxes and work. They accumulate trinkets and obligations and insurance policies. They attend weddings they scarcely enjoy and funerals they do not understand. And then they die. The newspapers report it; the bank settles the estate. And the world, in its usual forgetful manner, continues.
But I ask – did they ever live?
Life, true life, is not a task to be endured, but a mystery to be embraced. And yet how few treat it so. Most seem to believe that to draw breath is a sufficient credential for having lived. They confuse the rising and setting of the sun with the rising and setting of their own souls. As if the fact that the heart pumps dutifully along is proof that the spirit is dancing.
It is not.
You see, to exist is to be carried along by the great indifferent tide of Time, but to live, to live!, is to swim upstream with one’s eyes wide open and one’s heart flung forward like a torch. There is a certain madness required for true living, a holy disobedience of the humdrum and the expected. It is not found in ledger books or dinner parties or the endless drone of small talk about the price of eggs. It is found in walking barefoot across dew-wet grass before the world wakes up. It is found in singing (loudly, poorly, but honestly) while washing one’s socks. It is found in stopping, in looking, in realizing that this moment, this one right here, shall never return.
But we do not often stop. We are a hurried people, a restless and flustered race. We race toward retirement as if that were the summit of existence, the grand promised land where the laborers may finally rest. But what sort of heaven is that, if all the living has been spent in anticipation of a freedom that arrives too late? What tragic arithmetic we use; sacrificing our days for the illusion of future pleasure, and then, when the future arrives, finding our senses too dull to enjoy it.
Nietzsche, that fierce old romantic of the soul, thundered against such living death. He asked, not kindly, whether we could bear to live the same life over and over again. I suspect many would shrink from the thought, not because their lives are so terrible, but because they are so lifeless. Repetition of mediocrity is a punishment most cruel. To repeat a true life, however, one full of laughter, terror, beauty, and wild decision; that might be a reward even the gods envy.
I have heard it said that people fear death. I do not think this is quite true. What they fear is that they shall reach it and find, with a shudder, that they never truly lived. That they postponed joy. That they ignored wonder. That they fed their bodies and starved their souls. That they rehearsed for a play they never performed.
It is a peculiar paradox of man that he is granted but a single life and spends most of it behaving as if he were immortal. He delays the writing of the letter, the planting of the tree, the confession of love. He waits for the right season, the right savings, the right self. But life is not a pageant to be prepared for; it is the storm itself. One must dance in it, wet and wild, or else stay dry and dead beneath the porch roof.
I do not mean that one must chase thrills like a child at a fair. Living well is not the same as living loudly. A soul may be loud and still asleep. No, I mean something deeper, more still. I mean the kind of living that stops to notice the movement of clouds and names each one like an old friend. The kind that studies the lines on an old woman’s face and wonders what epics they contain. The kind that makes peace with solitude, and with silence, and with the fact that we are, all of us, ephemeral fireworks in an indifferent sky, and that this, precisely this, is what makes life so sacred.
For when you live in such a way, even a cup of tea becomes a sacrament. The steam curling up is a benediction. The first sip is a kind of prayer. The stillness between the next word and the last becomes a cathedral of possibility.
If I may give advice, it is only this: begin. Begin now. Live while you can. Walk slowly. Speak honestly. Laugh loudly, even in libraries. Waste no more of your hours in the polite sleep of normalcy. Leap, even if you are unsure where you shall land. It is better to limp from a glorious misstep than to march straight-backed into a life unlived.
So when the day comes, and it shall, that your body lies down for the last time, let it be a body tired from the labor of joy. Let your soul be threadbare from wonder. Let those around you say, “This one was alive.” And let death find you not as a stranger, but as one who has made peace with the brevity of the flame, and gave it everything before it flickered out.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.