MUSINGS ON THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE
I can’t see into my kitchen window from where I’m sitting. Flecks of sun bounce from the glass and hold trees in their reflection like a small canvas mounted on the wall. Shadows of leaves rustling in the breeze shimmer on the ground like drops of light glistening on surfaces of oceans and there’s a calm in the stillness that makes me feel like I’m in the middle of one. I can’t remember the last time the sky looked so clear, baby blue silk stretched seamlessly from one corner of my vision to the other without so much as a crease in the middle. The sound of cars pulling off driveways has been replaced by songs sung to each other by birds that have waited all this time to be heard; they talk so loudly that I wonder whether they were there this whole time or whether we just never listened. I have nowhere to be. My legs itch as I tell them to stay put, fighting to swim back to the shore instead of bobbing amid nothing and everything all at once. Time doesn’t seem to exist here; for the first time, I see the fragility in everything. We are suspended between being here and there, never in one place for fear of needing to be in the other and I think of all the times my garden has looked like this with no one around to see it.
We have built our lives from the ground up, each brick cryptically carrying the notion that we need to be more, do more, and want more. We have built empires out of belief systems that told us we need to be bigger and do better. We have belittled time into something that can be made to feel wasted, forgetting that to even have it at all is a blessing in itself. There is a tenderness to time as it is teased out, a gentleness to the way it carries us with it as it ebbs and flows. I am trying to train my mind and my body to not resist stillness and instead to search for its beauty, to not entitle myself to the idea that this moment is not my last. I am trying to teach my mind and my body to be; to not reduce these moments into something brushed under the carpet in the hope for something better.
I’ve spent years looking at life through a telescope that illuded me to its future; a promise that there is always more ahead to make up for rushing headfirst through it now. I tucked time I’ll never get back into my back pocket and looked instead towards the time I still had to come, heavy-handedly tearing at the seams of all the things that exist in each moment and never will again. I forgot somewhere along the way that it’s fleeting. Like water slipping through the gaps between our fingertips, we don’t realise how much we’re holding until it’s gone. At some point, we lost what it means to be present. We carry our pasts on our backs like coat hangers hung up from each vertebra and we reach towards the future with our arms stretched out for something to hold onto. We turn our backs on the sun as it descends over cities and places pockets of light in corners of rooms and tell ourselves we’ll watch it tomorrow. We hand a limb to every area of our lives and let them pull us in different directions, telling ourselves we’ll slow down tomorrow. We hurry out of doors and watch missed calls pile up like shoes at the back door and tell ourselves we’ll make time for them tomorrow. We are paper in the wind, never settling for too long for fear we’ll turn to dust. We are rush hour traffic, with places and people we never quite seem to get to. We are children going to sleep with tomorrow tucked into our pillowcases like promises, forgetting that the world doesn’t owe us a thing.
This morning, with myself and these words and my coffee and the sun pouring liquid gold onto every surface within its reach, I am here. I am slowly cutting holes in the fabrics of my mind that made me believe that simply being is not enough. There is no tomorrow morning that I know of. Life is fragile, each moment a fragment of glass that is ours to look through or ours to shatter. We hold pieces of it in the palms of our hands, and for the first time, I am handling it with care.