The tissue holding these moments together, feather-thin as it is, expands and pulls taut as a hesitant breeze carries the fleetest scent of fall for us to breathe in. Moods collide, launch forth into open air, crash empty to the unforgiving ground. Days drip one into the next, weeks gel together, and still we stand here bare and afraid. What is it going to take for us to be satisfied? When we will we stop our restless twitching? This is life, by god, and it is only here to be lived. There is nothing to figure out; all the mysteries we concoct are simply ghosts dancing on the head of a pin, taunting us even as they fade away. The windows we keep in our minds looking out onto future lives are glazed with thick smears of colorless idealism; the pictures of us that we see projected there are shiny distortions, marionettes we yank into desperate action after so many failed attempts to live wholly here and now. We convince ourselves that our daily lives constitute a dead existence, held fast by debt and fear of impoverished old age. But in truth we squander our time here, fretting and wishing instead of living. And it seems like such a simple thing, to merely live, to stay in a moment for its duration, filling ourselves with its wonder. Yet so many of us fail in this one endeavor we all can claim as our purpose. We only have a finite amount of these moments and each passing day drains thousands more of them into the black hole of mortality. The least we can do is spend our allowance before it disappears.
All posts in category mortality
spend it as you get it
Posted by sean on August 20, 2011
https://sd-stewart.com/2011/08/20/spend-it-as-you-get-it/
lightness
Beneath the crust lies a kernel. A kernel formed of decisions made and those deferred. Crack it open and free the seed inside to float away. Follow it. Down a deer trail. Under a rock. Into the reeds. Up in the air, over the ridge. Pay attention. Ignore the ghostly hands pulling at your collar, suggestive in manner, dragging you, enticing you toward a warm spot to curl up and stop. It’s always the decisions. Counseling for or against. Talking, hashing it out, pacing in deranged circles. Stop the pacing. Wrangle your thoughts and subdue them. Step back. Breathe. There is a lightness in us that we can reach. Tap it like a sugar maple and let it flow, sweet and pure. Drink it in and never stop. What will matter in the end is how we spent our days; these moments won’t return.
Posted by sean on June 7, 2011
https://sd-stewart.com/2011/06/07/lightness/
events transpire, time passes, and what end do we all hurtle toward
A year is a collection of days. These days fashion themselves into months, which clump together into seasons, both hot and dry, cold and wet. But only one continuum extends as far as we can walk. All else arbitrary. All else rationalizes what we look away from. That being our own end, from which we run, even as we draw nearer to it still. Peering back through the wine-sweet debauched years at the dull bluntness of youth, with the long and short of our yawning parched futures hunched on our bony shoulders. With the many crisscrossing paths diverging from our own, now choked with twisting brambles, now hiding forever what secrets they may once have held.
Posted by sean on October 8, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/10/08/events-transpire-time-passes-and-what-end-do-we-all-hurtle-toward/
juggling this mortal coil
>All this death and illness lately has made me sort of nervous. For the most part, I am comfortable with my own mortality. But recent events have shook me. Scratchy’s death was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to face in a long time. The fact that it was so out of the blue scared me. My grip on reality shattered instantly as fear, despair, and helplessness ripped through me when I found him lying there, cold and motionless. I suppose it is common to write about the finality of death, but its irrevocable nature is uniquely difficult to process. It makes me think about all the people (and animals) that I love. They could all equally be harboring some unknown condition inside them that might lead to their death. The same can be said for me. What has now been drifting around in my head is what to do with this information. Maybe Scratchy’s death was an elaborate reminder to me of the fleeting nature of life, and also a wake-up call to plan better for an unknown future. And maybe it too is a simple reminder that I need to more gracefully accept the constant changes hurtling around and through my life.
Posted by sean on January 9, 2008
https://sd-stewart.com/2008/01/09/juggling-this-mortal-coil/
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