It has certainly been a while.  Thank you to everyone reading this, still checking out this blog!  I appreciate it more than I can say.  Months have passed, and I’ve reflected a bit on life, on meaning, on what matters.  Winter, especially in frigid Vermont, lends itself to such reflections.

I’ve always been intensely aware of the fleeting qualities of life, the way time is always moving forward, inexorably, like water sluicing through the landscape of what we call reality.  As soon as a moment arrives, it is gone, vanished on the wind like smoke.  As you read these words, this sentence . . . as soon as you do, the moment will be gone.  The electrical energy in your brain will have processed the words, digested them, interpreted them, and will have moved on to the next sentence.  Such is life, over and over and over again.  Everything is fluid.  There is no stasis, no stoppage.  Every second ticks away, replaced by the next one and the one after that and the one after that.

What, then, is the meaning of it all?  If everything is always shifting, if 99 percent of our lives are forgotten–poof!–as if they never happened, what does it all mean?  Think about it.  What were you thinking at 6:03 a.m. this morning?  Yesterday morning?  When you saw someone on the subway last night–nothing extraordinary–just a random person on his way home–what happened?  What were you thinking?  Do you remember?  Or does the scene blend into the background, like virtually every second of our day-to-day existence, washed away in a fog of kinetic energy, of moment upon moment occurring, happening, moving forward, an endless array of events and thoughts and sights and sounds and dreams and tasks . . . a barrage that never stops?

What does it all add up to?  If we can’t remember the vast majority of our own lives, what does it mean?  I return to moments . . . memories.  The things we do hold onto.  The remembrances that are still there . . . living things, real emotions, pounding like a heartbeat in our minds and souls.  That time your friend stood up for you on the playground.  So many years ago!  And yet . . . and yet . . . if you close your eyes, if you allow your mind to transport you through the chasm of decades . . . you are there!  You can smell the woodsmoke in the air, emerging from the neighborhood to the north of the playground.  You can taste the fragrance, the essence, of autumn that day.  You can hear the crow cawing as it flies overhead.  You can see the silhouette of your teacher in the distance as she observes her class at recess.  And you can feel the emotions you felt . . . when the bigger kid started to pick at you, make fun of you, demean you.  You can feel the helplessness that crept up your spine, like a cancer.  You can feel the urge to cry, and the determination not to.  And then . . . you can see your friend step forward and put that bully in his place.  You are there.  You are present.  This memory is more alive than the many tasks you did yesterday or this morning.  They have already blended in to the shapeless mass of background noise that constitutes nearly all of our past experiences.  This memory, this event that you lived through, decades ago . . .  it is real.  It is for all time.  It will live in you for the rest of your life.

How many memories of this nature do we carry within us?  Permanent ones–moments that we’ll always remember, always be able to revisit, anytime we want.  (Or don’t want.)  Hundreds, maybe thousands.  They are a tiny fraction of our lives, which are made up of countless moments, layer upon layer, growing every second of every day we are here.  But these precious few, these eternal remembrances of times past–even the bad ones–they shape who we are, they speak to us at a cellular and spiritual level.  They are echoes of what once was, and will always be.  They make us understand that not *everything* is here today and gone tomorrow.  Some things endure.  Some things last and are there for us to reflect on and write about and share.  They are there to remind us that we have lived.  Life has happened.  We are more than just the sum of the seconds of our frenetic and fast-paced days.

And this is the meaning.  This is what matters.  Hold on to your memories.  Your experiences.  The people you loved.  The games you played.  The tears that fell.  The dreams that were dashed.  All of it.

We exist in uncertain times.  Countries lose their way.  Democracies die, buried under lies and apathy and feckless cowardice.  But we, as people, as individuals, as sentient beings with souls and hearts and minds. We remember.  We live.

We endure.

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike