⛔ Life is Temporary

Sebastian Junger wrote,

Dying is the most ordinary thing you will ever do but also the most radical. You will go from a living, conscious being to dust. Nothing in your life can possibly prepare you for such a transition. Like birth, dying has its own timetable and cannot be thwarted and so requires neither courage nor willingness, though both help enormously.

Life is a great many things. It's (too) fast. It's procedurally generated. It is no.

And, life is temporary. It is this temporal quality that makes life truly priceless. It is this unflinching aspect that animates every other aspect.

As Junger puts it, death operates in a unique space of being both manifestly ordinary and radical. And that is worth pausing to reflect on, isn't it.

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These were some of the thoughts running through my mind as I honored the fifth anniversary of my father's passing last weekend. Sitting on a bench with my mom outside the room where my father said his last cogent words, before his brain bleed set in and he was airlifted to surgery which bought us a dozen days of partial consciousness but couldn't ultimately save him.

I have written about my father many times in these pages before. He was an extraordinary man, and I miss him dearly. I have yearned for his guidance and wisdom more times than I can count since he left us. I have found anger and sorrow in his absence.

And yet, I consistently deepen my appreciation for that absence itself, or rather the fact of the absence and its inevitability. There is a juxtaposition at play here: I can wish with all that's in me that he was still here and also understand that the significance of his life is defined in part by the fact that it was finite. And the present tense matters there: the significance of his life is defined, and his memory and impact lives on and on.

The meaning of life, as Kafka said and as I've analyzed before, is that it stops. And visiting the site of my father's last coherence helps me face that reality, guided in part by another passage which has stuck with me:

The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.

The future isn't promised, which means I shouldn't wait for some eventual possibility to manifest before I start living. Indeed, I must live it all now, including the thorny and evasive questions. Perhaps especially those questions.

To seize the opportunities that exist, and to live my life as proudly and authentically as I can. To be there for my loved ones and to make the moments count.

Because when that supremely ordinary and final event occurs and I am no longer, I hope my final thought, if I'm blessed to have one, is that I lived.

Yours, in life,

-Rye