Pros And Cons To Living

What a whirlwind this life is.

To stand at the intersection of joy and grief, of creation and collapse, of beginnings that already contain their endings.

There is something almost unbearable about the way one can feel so alive while knowing, with aching clarity, that everything one touches is destined to pass.

To add good things into your life, to nurture the wholesome, to heal from old wounds, to chase dreams with trembling but determined hands… and yet, at the same time, to feel the heaviness of impermanence pressing down like a silent and invisible weight.

The paradox lives inside me… I want to build, to create, to reach for every dream with both hands stretched wide. I want to achieve, to climb, to carve meaning out of the silence. And yet, each step upward reveals how fragile it all is. Each laugh, each goal, each tender moment bears the quiet truth that it will vanish. The home and family of blood, friends and love, I build it all… the music I sing, the love I hold… it all exists within a span of time so small it is almost laughable. A blip in the cosmos, a breath between eternities.

At a young age, the world feels infinite.

As a child, I thought days stretched on forever, that summer nights or white winters that surrounded me, would never close their eyes. The earth felt steady beneath me, and time was too big to be questioned. I never imagined an ending. I never held the thought that one day, everything I loved would dissolve back into silence. But growing older, even just barely into my twenties, a new awareness crept in… slow, sharp, and undeniable. And it’s still here… Suddenly, the clock is not background noise. It is a drumbeat. It is the pulse of something vanishing, the echo of all that is fleeting.

The awareness becomes unbearable sometimes.

I see a person I love, and in the same moment that I smile at their presence, I feel grief rise inside me… grief for the day they will no longer be here, grief for the day I will no longer be here. A flower blooms, and I cannot stop myself from thinking of the soil it will soon return to. I drink in beauty and already mourn its departure. Nothing lingers. Everything slips through my fingers, no matter how tightly I try to hold it.

And yet, paradoxically, this hurts in a way that is strangely beautiful. It sharpens my eyes. It makes me notice the way light falls across the floor, the way laughter catches in someone’s throat, the way the air smells after rain. It makes me love more fiercely, as though every embrace might be the last. It makes me treasure even the smallest of moments… because they are not small at all, not when they carry the whole universe of “now.”

I sometimes wonder if the ache of impermanence is the very thing that keeps us awake, the thing that pushes us to keep writing, building, singing, dreaming. If we believed this all went on forever, would we cherish it? Would we hunger for meaning? Or is it the knowledge of our own vanishing that gives life its weight, its brilliance, its unbearable poignancy?

Life is both too much and not enough.

Too much to hold in a single heart, too fleeting to satisfy the hunger for permanence.

We reach, we grasp, we mourn, we rejoice. We carry the contradiction that joy and grief are twins, inseparable. To heal is to know we will be wounded again.

To love is to accept loss as part of the bargain.

To live is to walk beside death, not as an enemy, but as the shadow that gives light its meaning.

So here I am, holding both… the excitement of building a life filled with goodness, and the ache of knowing that life itself is slipping, always slipping. It hurts, but it also glows. It stings, but it also sanctifies. This fleeting existence, this blip in the cosmos, is both wound and wonder.

And somehow, even in the hurt, it is beautiful.

Let me know in the comments…

… What moments feel (or have felt) unbearably fleeting to you, and how do you hold them?