My
beautifully machined pen is showing signs of the half-dozen times I’ve
dropped it on the tile floors of Casa Yaya. "Nothing lasts. All things
change." But it’s nice to think that you can slow down the process.
Likely a general sense of contentment with occasional moments of
outright happiness must be tempered once in awhile by the unanticipated
brief realization that indeed progress towards the inevitable has
occurred. For me, these are moments of profound melancholy, a
mercifully fleeting sadness about the brevity of this wonderful
prolonged experience called life.
Keeping things vital is the great task we can set ourselves. Not in
some formulaic way. This can never work, because there are infinite
ways to live a life. The idea is to invest whatever we do with life,
like a reverse siege (though military people have always spoken of
"investing" a town or city by means of taking it, if possible,
passively).
There can be no how-tos, although we can try to tell one another how
to expedite or in some way ultimately ease the discomfort or
inconvenience that encounters with the real world can sometimes impose.
Shortening waits in international airports and elsewhere.
There can be an effort made to share what can be an infinitely
expansive way of engaging with life and injecting life into whatever
circumstance provides. This is what we should do. For some of us, this
is what we must do. When what there is to be spread around is in itself
an infinitely self-generating commodity — finding as much satisfaction
in a task as you are capable of — then generosity is a light burden, if
it is a burden at all. If God meant for us not to commune, not to
share, he would have made as many caves of minimally habitable space as
there are souls on the planet. We all must eat—why not eat well? And
the effort of preparation is as much for one as it is for six.
Though, in fact, one must begin with our selves making the effort of finding the life in things, or putting life into them.