My life flashed before my eyes. This phrase is generally used when someone is referring
to a close encounter with death—an assumed end of their life. But in truth,
our lives have already flashed before our eyes. In that moment when you awake into the world,
and light strikes your retinas for the first time, the shutter of your life opens, and you begin to
take everything in. From this moment on, in one continuous flash, you create your picture, trying
to get everything you want in frame; trying to get your smile right, your hair right, your position
right, the people right, the setting right. But there is only so much time. With each second,
each day, each year, slowly but surely the shutter closes, until eventually, it closes all the way.
When you’re young, and you’ve only lived a few years, time seems like an infinitely spanning
open plain. It doesn’t even really exist yet. You understand the concept, but it can’t hurt you.
At some point, though, forever turns to an age, to a number, to a ticking clock and a
changing calendar, a fifteenth birth, a thirtieth birthday, a sixtieth birthday. That open plain
has a horizon, and it’s moving toward you. As you age more and more, time seems to go
faster. Each new year weighs less in relation to the whole. One single year when you are five is
twenty percent of your entire life. That same year when you are thirty is just three. Like
a drop in a bucket, though the same size, each new drop appears less noticeable to the whole.
Not only does it seem like an increasingly fast pour, but as the bucket fills,
things also begin to submerge and dissolve away within it—your youthful innocence, your openness,
your propensity to have fun, your friends, your family, your hopes for something new and exciting.
Eventually, you reach a moment when you realize the bucket is becoming more full than empty,
and you are looking back more than you are looking forward. You find yourself longing for your past,
for how life once was—or perhaps more accurately, how life could be.
On one hand, nostalgia is beautiful: it shows us what’s been great about our life.
But on the other, it is a cruel deception: it hides from us what is true about our life.
Right now, this moment, this day, will also become a memory. But the truth is most memories
are forgotten—almost immediately. And when your future self looks back at this phase of your life,
you will almost certainly not remember this moment or this day. This includes all the things you are
worried about, sad about, stressed about, bored and unexcited by. And if you are not careful,
you will look back on this phase of your life, still having not learned nostalgia’s trick.
Every phase of life carries its baggage, its problems, its stresses, its tedious routines,
its positives and negatives. It is the curse of nostalgia to look back on the past and see only
the highlight real and feel none of these things. Since past problems have likely long since been
resolved or dissolved away into irrelevancy, you do not notice or feel them when you look back in
their direction. And you do not consider all the moments and days that you don’t remember at all.
But just like they are here, they were there, in every part of your life. They are always there.
As you age, you let go of certain things. With somethings, you don’t have a choice. With other
things, you have a choice and choose to let them go. And somethings you hold onto long past the
point of them still being good for you. Letting go, moving on, adapting, that’s growing up. But
perhaps more important than what you hold onto is how you hold onto what you do. In the words
of Sam Harris, “It’s not so much what we pay attention to, it’s the quality of our attention.”
Life isn’t some progression toward some grand, perfect, transcendent version of itself. It is
a continuous churning of days filled with little moments, with hopefully a few highlights here
and there. The real loss, though, would be to not embrace the whole image; to not notice and
appreciate as many little things as best you can. To seize the day isn’t to do anything differently
per se, but to consider what you do differently; to see each moment as the moment of your life
where everything is. Because in truth, each passing moment, however grand or small,
however trivial or exciting, is your life and all your life will ever be.
The play write George Shaw wrote, “Youth is the most precious thing in life; it is too bad it has
to be wasted on young folks.” We can never obtain our youth again once it is gone, but we can obtain
the wisdom to realize the mistake we might have made in youth: not realizing what we had. And
we can refrain from making it again, right now, while we are still the youngest we will ever be.
Eventually, you will do everything for a last time. There will be a last time you see your
friends, your father and mother; a last time you sit quietly next to a partner and watch light
from a screen flash against your faces; a last time you drive your car, stand up on your own,
brush your teeth, laugh, cry, feel a breath of air flow into your body. And if you could,
at any of these moments, you would, with enough cosmic intensity to light the stars,
long to do them another time. But you won’t. You can’t. Moments don’t come back. And right now,
you don’t know how many more you have left.
If there is one thing we ought to try to learn with age, it’s how to accept and embrace what our
life is, the little moments and the big, the sad and the joyful. It is all one big flash,
each phase of our life merely a different subject in the same image. If we want it
look a certain way, if we want our life to feel a certain way, the time to get in frame is now.
Because sooner or later, the time is up. The shutter closes. The picture has been taken.