We were getting back from a long trip and stopped near home to get gurasa from our favorite spot. I was sitting in my brother's parked car by the roadside, waiting for him to return with the food. It was the early hours of the night. The pulse of the not-so-distant city traffic was high, its machines roaring, the streetlights visible, and the sounds of a million voices so indistinct in the background that my mind struggled to keep up.
My phone vibrated and it was my brother calling. "Get me my wallet. My card's in there," he began as soon as I answered.
"Okay," I replied. "Should I lock the car?"
"No. Leave it unlocked, dumbass!" he added.
"Very funny," I chuckled. I hung up the call, got the wallet, and as soon as I opened the door, I realized I had fucked up. Another car was speeding down the street and I couldn't have possibly escaped from the driver slamming half of my already-tired body into the door I was holding.
The dim face I could barely make of the old man, held a pronounced look of horror. Everything seemed to have come to a halt, affording me the chance to watch my whole life flash in front of my eyes. Swimming in the full lights he'd illuminated me with, I could isolate each photon from the car's high beam headlights. The screeching sound of his brakes stretched into eternity.
What no one ever told me, perhaps rightly so seeing none ever came back from the dead, is that at a time like that, life doesn't flash. It replays, selecting the zaniest frames to magnify. Odd memories — some of them mundane in their own right — trenched in our psyche. Even though we remember them happening, it is only at the end that they genuinely return to us, clearer than when we left them in our hazy, unorganized archives.
For many people, having a good time (or a good life, really) isn't so much about them as it is about a vague audience acknowledging that fact. They go to a fancy restaurant and become dissolved in ways to better take a picture of the meal. Or, they squabble about getting that seat with the proper lighting angle to reflect a glowy skin tone. At the movies, they'd whip out their phones to, unironically, record an already recorded story. It ceases to be about the moment and turns into the documentation of life fragments that were anything but lived.
We see these people every day, and to some extent, we pity them, masking our own corollaries in judgment. In the face of such mindlessness, it is hard not to be disgusted at the idea that anyone could be so oblivious, blinded by their obtuseness. But only if we dig deeper do we realize that, as with many facets of life, this is a spectrum not even the most cognizant among us could escape.
It is fortunate then, that as blurry as they seem, the most significant parts of being human aren't absolutes. They constantly need to be reshaped and adjusted to the realities of life. A virtuous man's bible of truth is written in pencil, with the eraser constantly kissing the paper, painfully revising, as if to make up for his shortcomings and biases.
In a generation consumed by its meta ways, as with a man hell-bent on remaining moral, to truly live requires conscious effort. We breathe in wonders, that would take us lifetimes to explain, yet seem to act apathetic to any.
Our smiles are a universe filled with butterflies and rainbows, for instance, and yet we still get stingy sometimes. Consider music, too, — and there isn't bad music, only selective tastes — strings of ordered sound frequencies, traversing through our minds in an oscillating tune and transporting us to moods in dimensions that defy logic.
Every painting, a paean of feelings. Every book, a branching string of grammatical, syntactical and emotive relations, each curve and journey leading to another. All of it, an analogy to the beauty of life, and the illusory dance it is capable of causing.
When we watch the cold sunrise in the earliest hours of the day — or befriend the kaleidoscopic sunset with its peaceful clouds — we should feel a sense of connection to nature, and it should remind us of a comforting constant in an ever-changing world. Wise trees, determined to retain their beauty and elegance throughout each year despite the unforgivable cold and the scorching heat, illustrate the cosmos's indifferentness to our fate. In its thunderous spells, even the night rain is really only a love language — one that, for millennia, has both bewitched and kept us alive. Everything has its wonders, to quote Hellen Keller. “… even darkness and silence...”
In the end, those seemingly benign instances might be all there is to us and to our existence. They might be the films that play forever in our final moments, frozen frames lasting eternity and beyond. Our biggest regret would be realizing that we completely missed them, all because we were so focused on making others aware that we lived them. You do things and don't watch, observed Ray Bradbury. “Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”
The moon shone brightly above, its incandescence inundating the now blooming streetlights. I found myself standing by a familiar car in the street I owe the best of my childhood to. In my two hands were my phone, a car key, and a wallet.
Before I crossed the street, a car passed me by. Its driver, an older man, gave me a decisive, friendly honk. His face held a pronounced look of wonderment. I waved back, reluctantly. He probably knew me, but I couldn't seem to remember how or where — or why he seemed so delighted to see me. It was the same street, yet so different from when I was a child. And everything was undoubtedly unlike anything from just a second ago. The phone was now buzzing.
“What is taking you so long?" asked the voice on the other end.
“Huh... Oh... right. The wallet. Sorry,” I replied.