And Why I Would Do It Again
There is a particular kind of foolishness I have always admired.
The kind that knows something cannot last and tries to make it beautiful anyway.
We know better.
We know the summer ends.
The children grow.
The friends leave.
The table gets cleared.
The lights come on.
Eventually everyone goes home.
And still, sometimes, we try to hold the moment.
We take the photograph.
We stay up too late.
We build the thing.
We tell the story.
We make the night a little bigger than it needed to be.
We spend ourselves on something whose expiration date we already know.
This is objectively terrible economics.
If the purpose is preservation, we have failed before we begin.
A moment is not a possession.
You cannot put it in a box and keep it there.
You cannot hold a conversation still.
You cannot make a room remain full of the people who once filled it.
You cannot prevent time from doing what time does.
And yet—
I think there is something worth doing here.
Not preserving the moment.
Honoring it.
There is a difference.
To preserve something is to try to keep it from changing.
To honor something is to give yourself to it while it is here.
Sometimes that means making something absurdly elaborate for people you know you won’t know forever.
Sometimes it means staying at the table a little longer.
Sometimes it means giving a child your full attention.
Sometimes it means making something beautiful that nobody will ever pay you for.
Sometimes it means writing down a thought because you know that one day you will desperately want to remember how it felt to think it.
The strange thing is that these acts are often expensive.
Not necessarily in money.
In time.
In effort.
In sleep.
In vulnerability.
In the little pieces of yourself that disappear into something you are making.
And there is no guarantee.
The people may forget.
The thing may break.
The website may disappear.
The story may go unread.
The photograph may eventually become a file nobody opens.
The room will empty.
You will sit alone again.
This is the part where the sensible person might say:
Why bother?
And perhaps they are right.
Perhaps it is foolish to spend so much energy making something temporary.
But I have begun to suspect that temporary is not the opposite of valuable.
It may be the reason something is valuable.
A sunset does not become meaningless because it ends.
A meal does not become pointless because you will be hungry again.
A song does not fail because the final note disappears.
We don’t accuse the song of being futile.
We listen.
Perhaps a life is somewhat like that.
You don’t get to keep the song.
You get to hear it.
And if you are lucky, sometimes you get to make part of it.
So yes.
I know better now.
I know the trick doesn’t work.
You cannot hold a moment.
You can only put something of yourself into it.
You can build a little structure around it.
You can make it strange.
You can make it beautiful.
You can give everyone inside it something to remember.
Then it ends.
And you are left with the peculiar evidence that it happened:
A story.
A photograph.
A scar.
A laugh you still remember.
A phrase that somehow survived.
A feeling that returns unexpectedly years later.
Maybe that is all we ever really keep.
Not the moment.
The mark it left while passing through us.
And still, if someone offered me the chance to do it again—
knowing what I know now,
knowing that the room would eventually empty,
knowing that the people would scatter,
knowing that I would someday sit alone and miss them,
knowing that all the effort would eventually become memory—
I think I would.
Absolutely.
I would spend the time.
I would build the ridiculous thing.
I would stay up too late.
I would make the memory too elaborate.
I would pour the good stuff into something temporary.
Because perhaps wisdom is not learning to stop doing foolish things.
Perhaps wisdom is learning which foolish things are worth doing.
There are some things I would not try to hold anymore.
People.
Time.
Outcomes.
The past.
But a moment?
If it is a good one?
Hand me the tools.
I’ll try again.
I know it won’t work.
That’s okay.
I wasn’t really trying to make it last.
I was trying to make sure that, for a little while,
we were really there.
And sometimes,
that is worth everything it costs.
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