Today has been one of the most emotionally hard days I have had in memory and I am glad it is over. As hard as it was for me, it has been a magnitude harder for my wife and all I can do for her is just be here and let her feel what she feels and heal as she heals.
Even though we had a few days time to prepare for this moment, the closer it got the more valuable each second became. While we talk about scarcity, in the moments leading up to a point as final as death, scarcity stops being a concept and becomes something far more solid, thick and oppressive with the sense of its immediacy.
For me, I wanted to capture moments of us together, but restrained myself so as not to impose on my wife's relationship with the experience, nor take away from the moment for my daughter. I could have shot a thousand frames and I still would have needed more for me to feel like, that is enough.
But the last one I shot was this one from my phone. Parked outside the vet saying goodbye in private until it was time to take him inside and hold him until we said goodbye for the very last time.
The house feels empty.
But it is time to fill it again, to build a new family dynamic, in a new home. There is still so much left to do and a life ahead of us that will have a lot more beauty in it, as well as a lot more sorrow to come. The tides of life ebb and flow until they still, with the troughs and peaks, the highs and lows, being the points that we focus on, the defining moments that impress themselves into the memory. Yet, it is the sloping sides, the slides into the abyss and the ascent back to the peak where we spend most of our time and how long we head downward is going to determine how long it takes us to make the climb back.
There is a new year on the horizon, there are new opportunities awaiting discovery, there is work to be done. I feel like I have been on hold for so much of this year and despite all the work I have done, I feel stagnant in my own skin. I feel lazy. I feel the state of procrastination strengthening, stealing my motivation, my curiosity for exploration. I feel myself wasting my potential away.
But, I am not gone yet, there is still a lot of life ahead of me and that life needn't be lived on default. Every moment is infinitely scarce, as each fragment will only ever truly happen once and is indivisible from the entire stream. Each moment is the last and just like I couldn't ever capture enough frames, we can never capture the entirety of life and each moment comes burdened with the opportunity cost of the spectrum of all possible experience in that moment.
Our anger and sadness, our aggression and grief - how much time do we want to spend held in these moments, when there is the potential for happiness and love. How much time can we spend arguing over trivialities and absurdities, when there are real discussions on the table to consider, real problems to solve and challenges to overcome. How much of our momentary lives are spent doing what we find valuable personally, let alone valuable to others. There are no question marks in this paragraph - your consideration is not an answer for me.
I am tired. Not from the work I have done, but the work I have left undone. There is always more to do in this life and I believe that to embrace it is to direct our own evolution, even if just at the personal level. Where we find meaning in the world is up to us and the experiences we live are ours and ours alone. Each decision we make is in self-interest, even if it helps countless others, as we do it for a reward, and accomplishment, a pat on the shoulder or the feeling that we did was the right thing to do when we did it.
In this way, we are instinctual, we are animals to the point that our actions and motivations in the moment are beyond us, we just do what we do in the moment and it is only in reflection that we consider if what we did was what we should have done. Even when we plan ahead, time isn't set in stone until it has come to pass and there is no way back.
In the next moment, everything is possible.
In the last moment, nothing more is possible.
At that timeless point between the next and the last, all of life happens. As does death.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]