time passes

To me, one of the most beautiful things about life is the way humans cling to it.

Regardless of age or era, we have always been innately hardwired with this instinctive desire to encapsulate and hold onto beautiful things. Why else would art exist? We paint, we sing, write, dance, tell stories, take photos, theorise, worship gods, research wonders, learn, share and connect. The world starts inside people’s hearts and minds. This beautiful, insatiable obsession with extending the shelf life of beautiful moments is a habit to which I’ve always found myself succumbing - perhaps as a means to cope with the overwhelm of it all? Or so that little pockets of emotion can live on inside the art, exist within it and therefore alongside us? A means by which we can hack the universe and allow the past to come with us from inside a journal entry or Instagram grid post?

Sometimes it overcomes me, the intensity of the present, the yearning to never allow beauty, and time, to bypass me, to always take it in. A fear of missing life happening before my eyes yes, but more - a fear of not appreciating the richness, a fear of forgetting or dismissing the way my life is coloured by the everyday.

Seeing a woman smiling at her phone on the bus - a text from a loved one? A stupid meme? What made you laugh queen? How lucky that I missed the first 246 and had to catch the next one, so that I got the chance to witness and marvel at life happening around me. Those midnight chats in the kitchen with my girls where I swear we could solve the issues of the world if you gave us each enough time, a ritalin and a coke no sugar. Being on some dance floor sideways at 4am holding my friends and squealing from under my sunglasses I LOVE YOU GUYS AND IM SO GLAD WE’RE ALTOGETHER AGAIN. Sitting across the cafe table from a friend and having the most rich and intricate conversation that makes my heart thump with passion, taking in the sights, the smells and the sounds, thinking to myself remember everything about this moment, because one day this will only be a memory, and you’re gunna be jealous of the girl who gets to be right here in it. As if I can hold the moment preciously in my two hands, and keep the memory forever.

I wish I were better at letting go, better at reckoning with the richness of the present, that nostalgia didn’t have such a comfortable seat at the table of my mind. I wish I were better at accepting that time passes. It would make it more tolerable to bear.

But truth be told, I don’t at all.

Oh to be seduced by the impossibility of preserving beauty as it occurs!

I love absorbing beauty and I love striving towards the creation of a capsule that serves as a vessel of emotion. I grasp and pull myself toward any possible way of keeping intact the most precious parts of life. That instinct is what reminds me that I’m alive. Journalling after a beautiful afternoon with friends, jotting down nuggets of wisdom birthed from hour long conversations with my mum and dad, drowning myself in tragic music to make sense of pain, asking old people about what their life was like, breaking my own heart when I cannot bottle the sound of my friends laughter, or the feeling of being tucked into bed as a child, or the electricity of kissing the man I love.

And I never can. And neither will any artist. We relentlessly produce art and build churches and peruse ancient texts and write poetry and perform plays and preserve family photos and attempt to make permanent the antithesis of anything that will or can stay the same. The universe must see this all the time and laugh at the fact that we’re so adorable, but we’re missing the point. If the present stayed forever how else would we comprehend what a gift it is?

TIME PASSES and it’s there where the beauty lies.