I think it’s natural to reach a point in your life where you start to question who you are and what you meant to the world. I have talked about it before, the idea of legacy, but this is more about the moments that populate our lives.
Our lives are so strange in that it’s a show for an audience of one. No one else will feel what we feel, do what we do, and live as we live. As much as we like to depersonalize ourselves and get on the ‘every life has been lived, every story told’ kick, it’s not true. The broad strokes are the same, sure, the love, hate, sorrow, and glee, but each person is a chemistry of all of it in differing forms and strengths making us all unique.
And no one will ever fully see the lives we live but ourselves.
So many stories, so many moments disappear as we do.
I have mourned enough people and it never fails to astound me how we can be summed up in a handful of words. Our lives, long or short, distilled into the easily presentable.
Each person we had memorable interactions with remembered us differently.
Some love us.
Some hate us.
Some wish we’d never been born.
Just as we will never know how we were really seen, thankfully, we will never know how we are remembered.
Our lives are our own to live.
Not that that frees us from responsibilities or guilt or joy. It means that taking ownership for the lives we lead matters. It means that we need to understand the consequences of our actions and our lives.
That we take ownership of our lives, and that we try to do the right thing matters.
We screw up.
Welcome to life.
But our lives matter.
And it matters that we fade.
This world is not ours for all time.
We are not promised eternity.
It’s that we cannot rely on a thousand tomorrows and then a million afterward that gives life meaning. We have to fade, body and memory, because the world needs to renew.
The future is not ours alone.
It is everyone’s and it is meant for generations to come.
I hate that so much of my mother and father and friends have been lost.
That their stories are lost to me and were never known fully to me.
A day will come and I will pass away and my daughter will only know the man that was her father. My friends will only know the person that they called friend. My wife will only know the man she married. No one will know the totality of it all because I will be gone.
Even I cannot remember all of my stories, but that’s also part of life.
The winds of time blowing those petals off the flower.
Some will live beyond history but not many, and those that do are caricatures and little else. The full reality of who they were is gone and all they are is statues and stories.
Few of us can say the same of our own fates.
And that is fine, because everything fade.
Even us.
Life’s beauty comes from its briefness and what we make of it. The lives we touch, the loves we share, and even the sins we commit. It’s all part of a tapestry of the human story.
I mourn the life I never lived, the life I live, and the life I will lose, because it’s never enough, never, and yet it just enough to tell my story.
However long it’s meant to be.
And I am but a chapter in the book of humanity.
And that too will fade.
…c…
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The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 