(This article comes from my 2-year daily writing challenge, which I am using to think about how to live a good and meaningful life.)
Each and every moment is full of a million deaths.
Some are spectacular; a star explodes in a violent and fiery supernova as it consumes too much of itself for gravity to hold it together any longer. Some are tiny: an apple rots forgotten in a cupboard, never to be tasted nor to grow into the tree it was meant to become. Some are mundane: you go for a walk and don’t even notice the ant you step on. And some are life-changing: a parent, friend, wife, or child dies unexpectedly, leaving a conspicuous and unfillable hole in your soul.
Even things that we see as vital and living new creations spring from a legacy of other things’ ends. An original, beautifully dark and brooding melody springs from a heart recently broken by a relationship’s demise. The delicious summer cherries you so look forward to only come into existence following the withering decay of the blossom. Even the birth of a new baby, pushed slimy and squalling into a crushing sea of air its lungs are ill-equipped to handle, betides the end — the death — of the pregnancy that grew it (along with postpartum feelings of loss sometimes compared to those following the death of a loved one).
For those of us possessing a heightened awareness of the ends of things — attuned to the transience that is built into all objects and into each moment — it can sometimes be overwhelming simply to move through the world.
An illustration:
On an ordinary day many years ago I was walking down the street when I came across a squirrel, sitting in a small tree in someone’s front yard, no more than a few feet from me. Being naturally curious creatures, the squirrel and I paused to regard each other. I wondered what it was thinking, what it had been doing with its day before I interrupted it. I looked at how it sat, it’s feet so unconsciously confident of their position on the thin branches of the tree, how its slender and agile hands grasped the crab apple it had been eating. We stood that way for a minute or so, and then I went on my way. I assume the squirrel resumed its meal.
From one perspective, this was an utterly ordinary encounter, the kind that we have dozens of times every day (there is no shortage of squirrels where I live). But for some reason, this particular encounter profoundly moved me. I found myself thinking about it, eyes misting, for the rest of that day, and indeed for months and even years following. I sometimes wonder if I will think of the squirrel as I myself am dying.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized why this short encounter so deeply affected me, because it required looking at the encounter from a perspective almost diametrically opposite from the one which made it seem so unremarkable. What was it that I realized?
Here is the story from that other perspective.
The day of our encounter, I stepped out of my house to run an errand. I set off down the street, choosing one of perhaps a dozen paths through the neighborhood that would deliver me to my destination. Each step I took, each turn I made, decided by who knows what turnings of thought in my head, served to deliver me to that tree at that moment, feeling open, aware, curious, and vulnerable. And the squirrel had exactly the same experience that morning. It woke up in its nest, set off to find a meal, and whatever turnings of thought led it to decide that some crab apples would be nice — resulting in it being in that tree, at that moment, feeling more curious than afraid — must have been remarkably similar to my own. For that moment in time, the squirrel and I shared a connection that I have rarely felt before or since. We were the same. Both brought, serendipitously, to a moment in time and space where we — two separate, conscious beings — gazed upon another and saw mirrored there ourselves.
The series of events and decisions that day that delivered us both to that exact place has not occurred before or since in this universe. It was a perfectly unique moment, precious as only a perfectly unique thing can be. That was the other perspective. I got goosebumps as I realized it.
But even that perspective wasn’t the full truth. The moment was in fact even more profound than I initially realized, thinking only of the timing of the decisions the squirrel and I had made that day.
A series of realizations began to cascade over me: this encounter would not have happened had I chosen to live in a different apartment, perhaps even on a different floor of my apartment building. It would not have happened had I not gone to the school I went to, earned the degree I earned, moved to the place I moved to in order to make use of that degree. It would not have happened had I been raised with a different set of values, or in a different nation. It would not have happened had my parents not met when they did, or if their parents had not met when they did. It would not have happened had a few dozen men and women of foresight not collectively developed the idea of the United States of America (and determinedly brought about its birth), nor would it have happened had European empires not viciously conquered the “new world,” nor if mankind had not discovered agriculture in the fertile crescent, nor if the precursors to homo sapiens never learned to stand on two feet to gain a view above the prairie grasses of Africa. It would not have happened had the spinning cloud of dust that became this solar system been structured just slightly differently, or if earth had come to rest in an orbit closer to or farther from the sun, or if some cosmic collision had not created the moon, whose tidal forces for millions of years pulled and pushed on the crust of the earth, freeing the necessary elements to create life. My encounter with the squirrel was, from the most remarkable perspective of all, the culmination of everything that has ever happened. It was therefore an even more profound perfectly unique moment than I had formerly realized, and my awareness of it still occasionally shakes me to a depth of emotion I rarely feel.
And then it was gone. I just… walked away, and got on with my day. That moment vanished like a mirage, existing only in my memory, a pale, imagined replica made of connected neurons and electrical impulses. It was the death of a moment the universe spent billions of years creating.
Is it not the deepest, most profound of tragedies that we live in a universe where such miracles as this pass us by in countless numbers and we hardly give them a second thought?
Everything that exists, that has ever existed, that will ever exist, shares one common fate: someday, past or future, it will exist no longer. Individually in our own way, in our own time, we will die. In this you and I are the same as the gazelle, the tree, the squirrel, the worm, the blade of grass, the rock, the dirt. It is a connection shared by everything in the universe. Even the universe itself, to the best of our knowledge, will someday burn out and die.
Sometimes I think all of it is meaningless. That only the first perspective is true — random chance filling our awareness with utterly mundane occurrences, again and again, until we die.
But then I think this: at this moment, you are sitting, reading this post. In your bedroom, or a coffee shop, or on the bus, or listening as you drive home from work. An ordinary day in your ordinary life, reading an ordinary post on an ordinary website. And all that’s true. From the meaningless perspective.
From another perspective, you are sitting in the middle of a miracle. Before you were even born, a million decisions, made both by you and others over a lifetime of moments, have brought you to this moment. From your parents instilling you with a desire to know the meanings of things, to your learning to read, to your having disquieting experiences that reinforced to you the transience of your life, to the recommendation or search that led you to this post, every single thing you have done in your life has delivered you to right now, reading these words, thinking these thoughts. And in this moment, you and I are connected in a profound way. I sit here in my home, reaching out to you, though I don’t know who you are. I want you to know the profound sense of privilege I feel to be able to share these thoughts with you. I want you to know that the miraculous series of events that has brought our minds into this brief union is special because it, like each moment, is perfectly, radically, wonderfully unique. No one will read these words in the same place or time as you, will interpret them in the same way, will take away the same lessons. And the moments that delivered you here will continue on, delivering you a thousand more miracles every single day. And all you have to do to see them is look.
This deep sense of connection existing in each moment is one of the things that makes life precious. When you next stand in line at the grocery store, think about how it is that your life and the life of the person next to you have delivered you to almost the exact same moment in space and time. That you are, right then and there, in the middle of the most ordinary of activities, sharing an intimate connection almost unlike anything that can be imagined. Can you feel the power of it? And we just watch these experiences go by us, time and again, day after day. We don’t even notice.
All I ask of you is… start noticing.
