Walking into the Chapters bookstore, the first thing that caught my attention was a display that included rows of Marina Keegan's The Opposite of Loneliness. The cover photo showed a brunette standing in a yellow coat. She looked young. I opened it up and flipped to the biography jacket where everything appeared to be standard. Photograph, her name, and then the brackets. (1989-2012).
Earlier this week I finished reading Viktor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned, and the first three books in the Anne of Green Gables series. It was the Anne books that I thought of when I saw the brackets. (1989-2012). One of Anne's childhood friends is dying of consumption and says to her "I don't want to die. I'm afraid to die. I'm so young, Anne. I haven't had my life. I want to live. I want to live like other girls."
I read Marina Keegan's essay, The Opposite of Loneliness, and found this passage to be especially poignant:
“But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old.”
How many of us don't expect to make it to 30? We procrastinate, we delay, we tell ourselves and each other that there is more time. And there usually is, until there isn't.
Death can come at any time. It is through our profound acts of living - those small pleasures and intensities, the growth, the pain, the love - it is in the minute details of these moments that we shore up against death, so that when death does come, we can say we lived fully, we can say we did not waste the days gifted to us.
In the past month, I had quit my job and moved back home. There were general notions of 'writing' and 'philosophy' and 'taking some time off'. When asked by several friends and acquaintances how the writing was going, the answer followed in some variation of "I'm still figuring it out, I've got some ideas. No, I don't have anything to actually share with you right now."
Writing has been terrifying. I write all the time - in notebooks, on scraps of paper, in emails to friends. But the thought of writing for an actual audience has been absolutely terrifying. Writing has been such personal work, and I've wanted it to be good, to be perfect. It's a skill though, one that is acquired and improved on over time through practice, and most of us starting out are going to be bad, to be mediocre. But starting is better than doing nothing.
We develop intentions, we plan, we say we'll get to it. But it's what we do that we leave behind. It's the phone call when your overseas friend is homesick. It's choosing to be patient and choosing to say the kind thing even when we feel like doing the exact opposite. It's when you sit down and actually write words instead of merely talk about the words you'll write.
In the words of Mary Oliver, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
What is it? Are you doing it?
Thank you for reading,
Rebecca