The eminence of distance in a moment

Riding home on the bus this evening, I was reading a book – trying to make the most of my time – when a woman a few seats up exclaimed how beautiful the sunset is. I looked up from what was admittedly an enthralling read (on mindful silence, nonetheless) and to my subdued, high school romanticism there across the sky lay the most breathtaking sunset I had ever seen. It beamed bruised blood orange before subduing into a pastel gradient that at last adumbrated the foreboding saturated stratus clouds. I was eminently present in the distance – not wanting to look away.

Then a degenerate thought crept into my mind: I should take a picture and capture this radiance for all time. Yet I hesitated, critical as I am about reproduced art and the beauty of a captured image as being inauthentically inferior to the unanticipated and thus unprimed transcendentalism of the pregnant moment. I hesitated, yet pulled my phone out anyway. I fumbled through the dallying commands to pull up the camera – being sure to look up with every operation so as not to lose the moment. But the moment was already lost the instant I looked away, entering a new moment and betraying my embodying gaze as my eyes readjusted to what was right in front of me. Sure enough, by the time the camera function was engaged, the bus was already rolling. I tried to snap a picture but it came out blurry.

I tried to retain the picture of the image in my mind, but it was already lost to inefficient descriptors – trying in vain to reconstruct what words always fail to precisely signify. Near my stop the bus came into line of sight with the sunset again, but now it had morphed into a goldenrod aura set atop an apricot horizon. Just as delicious, yes, but a totally different sunset; and I wasn't about to make the same mistake twice.

Because it's not right in front of us, it's easy to look away to our foreground. But by doing so, we lose focus so that if we return and attempt to re-gain focus, the object in the distance, not being subject to our immediate, intimate scrutiny, may very well have changed. So too with life.

Work and Play

Hospice workers report that one of the top regrets of people on their deathbeds is working too much and not spending enough time with their family. In the spirit of “living more”, what exactly, if not work, would people do? Looking outside right now it is sunny – a nice day for a brisk walk. But were I to walk, I would likely be thinking of the work I need to do. If my work was done, then I could walk calmly – a serenity produced from a sense of accomplishment. We relax and partake in recreational activities as contrast to our time working. We can only enjoy them with respect to work, for if we had no work to do and had all the time to do recreational activities, then boredom would surely afflict us sooner or later. We are not such a ludic species that, even if independent of economic factors, we could spend all our time reveling and enjoying. Living life, as the superlative phrase has come to mean, signifies breaching one’s comfort zone and doing fun things. But breaching one’s comfort zone can only happen with respect to having a comfort zone, and likewise doing fun things only has meaning with respect to things that aren’t fun. Thus the live-your-life imperative demands that we balance work and play – recognizing the role and necessity of each. It’s not simply that work gives one purpose and play gives one diversion; but that work necessitates play and play necessitates work. Only through appreciating the binary dynamic can, I think, one truly become content with one’s life in the face of a society that demands both that we continuously strive to climb the ladder of achievement while also exhorting us to take the time to enjoy the boons life offers. The best boons of all, if they don’t remove us from the world, teach us how to live meaningfully inside it – those that make sense of an otherwise latently entropy-yoking system.