I feel like I blinked and my world ended.
There’s something profoundly unfair about how the universe continues its steady march when your world stops turning. My great-grandmother Anna Pearl lived almost a century, and she was the beginning of everything I consider my family. She was our origin story, our foundation, our North Star. I don’t know anything before her, but everything that came from her created the world I know. Her absence leaves an impossible void.
The same void echoes where Uncle Colin and Uncle Dale once stood – men whose presence made me feel both safe and seen. How dare the universe not pause to weep with me? How dare the sun rise and set as if these pillars of my existence haven’t crumbled?
We spend our lives planning, preparing, starting, and restarting – all within the shadow of inevitable endings.
There’s a cruel irony in how we’ve structured our existence: I need so little to smile – a moment of peace, a burst of beauty – yet I must navigate endless mazes of obligation to catch even ten minutes of genuine joy.
The corporatization of our existence has twisted us into strange shapes.
We’ve forgotten how to rest, how to create without an audience, and how to share our gifts without monetizing them. We’ve been so thoroughly trained to abandon ourselves that when we die, our eulogies become résumés – as if our careers were the sum of our souls.
Is that really it? From classroom to cubicle to five seconds of rest before expiration?
The globalization of our personal journey has us chasing carrots that never stop moving, caring about things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of our brief existence. I’m blessed to earn my living through words, but I harbor no illusions – when I end, the world won’t notice.
As someone chronically online, consuming more than creating, I’ve witnessed a shift in consciousness.
People are asking: What’s the point?
What’s the purpose of working endlessly to feed families we never see? Why pursue passions without validation? Why care for bodies destined to expire? Why this endless cycle of hurry-hurry-buy-buy if none of it follows us beyond the veil?
It feels unfair that life lacks an inherent point. Yet slowly, I’m learning to be okay with that.
I’m learning to find peace with the world’s rotation even as my personal planet burns. I’m discovering that my enjoyment alone justifies any pursuit. That caring for my body is worthwhile simply because it lets me move through existence with grace. That neither rushing nor procrastinating serves the soul. That providing for my family has value when balanced with presence.
I’m learning that life’s worth isn’t diminished by its impermanence.
That gifts don’t need purpose – they simply need gratitude and the freedom to be used as we choose.
As I prepare my home and heart for the changes ahead, I find myself grateful for this daily opportunity to create new worlds, and for the serenity to accept when old ones end.
In this space between endings and beginnings, I’m learning that meaninglessness itself can be a gift – a blank canvas upon which we paint our own purpose.
After all, isn’t that the most beautiful gift of our fleeting existence? The freedom to create meaning in the very act of living?
Until soon.
