I heard a phrase the other day that sat with me for a while before it really began to settle. “It’s just like this for now.” It sounds quite simple when you hear it for the first time. “It’s just like this for now.” To look around and know that there will never be an exact replica of this moment—that this, each individual moment—and is utterly unique.
Do you remember being a child on the way home from a road trip vacation? The way your eyelids would flutter as the sun sank low beneath the trees and countless cars hummed their ways by, finding yourself stopped at a gas station or rest stop somewhere along the way in the quiet of the night. It is a harmless stop, truly. You glance around and while it is eerily quiet, with not a soul around, there is something peaceful about this place. About knowing that you will most likely never be here again, this moment will remain frozen in your memory and one day, slip away entirely. When I was a child, those places reminded me of a sort of twilight zone, a place where time did not really pass except by the flickering of aged neon ‘Open’ signs.
What about the first time you fell in love? The way time seemed to slow and stop altogether with the light in their eyes. How the center of the Earth’s gravity seemed to shift and nobody else in the world noticed that you were suddenly always drifting toward them? There were the most beautiful, sacred of moments of entire conversations without uttering a word. When was the last time you felt so deeply connected to someone? Does anyone truly know how delicate the first love is until it is gone?
There is quiet beauty in the singularity of these instances and little to be forgotten, but that does not solely count for the best ones. The most incredible things in life are to be appreciated, but so are the worst. How many times have we all heard the phrase, “Nothing lasts forever”? It took me long after hearing it to finally understand that the truth staring us in the face is that– absolutely nothing lasts forever. It will all come to an end. Good or bad.
When the moments hurt, they often don’t even last for more than a few days. Sometimes, grief or fear is the only thing we see for so long that whenever light starts to shine, we have become so accustomed to our suffering that we are afraid of feeling anything different. We condemn ourselves to our own perpetual misery in such a way that it obscures the thought of any other possible outcome. You must remember–We must remember that it really is only like this “for now.”
When the clouds have parted and it is finally beautiful again, bask in it like sunshine. Revel in it like thunder. Let it take your breath and send you spinning. Enjoy it. Do not allow yourself to look back in 80 years over a treasure hold of memories and wish that you had spent a second differently. You must live, because as beautiful or as damning as it may be, the truth is that nothing lasts forever.
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