Tuesday 3 February 2015

Life is fleeting.


Our life is fleeting. It lasts for a season. Some pass on sooner. Others stay for longer. If a moment is to be stitched with another, it would be a cloth that will not stretch on forever. We will no doubt find coverage in the initial years where our growth is wrapped in warmth. But thereafter, who is to tell whether there is enough cloth to cover us as we age?

Each moment is there to connect us to the next. But whether we savor them or not is another matter altogether. A moment can be spent with haste or with grace. We can overlook it completely or we can pay it the attention it deserves. Either way, a moment's job is done when it transports us from one event to the next. The chain will not be broken just because we give it a miss or take it for granted. And when it’s gone, it’s gone. It bids us no farewell. It craves not for our nod of approval. It lingers not a moment longer.

A moment comes and goes and collectively they stitch up the narrative of 
our lifetime. It takes each moment to tell our life story. Like words on paper, our story is written on the cloth of time. But each moment past draws us closer to the final moments of our life. For some of us, the final moment comes sooner than we desire. We may struggle to live longer but we can't struggle to live forever. Even the richest among us cannot exchange all its fortune for a moment longer when the final curtain calls.

Although we do not know when is our last moments, we nevertheless know the end when it draws near. We are acutely sensitive to the last moments of our life. They are the ones we take the most notice of. We seem to have an intense bias for the final bow. These moments will perceptively be the longest too. We stretch them in our own desperation to live.

Unlike the moments of our youth, the moments reserved for our dying years will be our most treasured ones. We are scarce to take them for granted. We will wish that each moment last longer than the one that precedes 
it. But we wish in vain because the length of each moment is no longer than the one that comes before and after it. Each of them comes in equal metronome swing; no longer or shorter. Recall that each moment will pass us by whether we appreciate it or not, whether we bother or not.

So life is indeed fleeting. We will never know at any given time the remaining moments in our life. A life can in fact be changed forever in a moment. And in that moment, everything changes with it. As you read this, you are living from one moment to the next. And yet, it is strange that we often discriminate between the moments. In our youth, we take not a moment to consider its passing. But at our passing, we shed a tear for every moment lost. And to compound the strangeness, we often wait for the big moments in our life and miss out on the linking moments that trail before and ensue after. And when it is time to go, when it is time to leave our loved ones for good, we ask ourselves ruefully, "Where has time gone?" I guess the better question is, "Have we treasured each moment born?" Cheerz.

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