Some Nights
Sean Moore
Days and nights fly past, fly past; what am I doing right now?
Every moment is as fragile as the next. We won’t know, we can never know, what the next one will hold, whether we will make it through or simply cease to be.
It’s easy to quote the odds, how unlikely that it is that the next second will be our last, and so what does it matter if there is a missed opportunity here or there? I know the odds; existence now is a very strong predictor of existence in the moment. But tell that to the aneurysm. To the semi-truck you didn’t see. To the heart attack, to the virus, to the cancer. Remember how unlikely it is that you are here in the first place, remembering that the house always wins. The universe will collect, someday, and is not particularly concerned about whether you’ve adequately prepared.
Maybe some nights you go to bed convinced that you might very well not wake up in the morning. You go to sleep with the very plausible idea in your head that your expiration date was now, that you’re finished, through, that you’re not just washed up, that you’re washed out, you’re washed away and you better be okay with everything that came before this moment, that you haven’t wasted it, that the pieces of your life matter to you in some spectacular fashion.
There are nights like this. Nights that stretch into infinity, the passing of every second swelling to a crescendo before falling silent again, announcing their arrival and with it the realization that I am still alive, still breathing, and I still have a chance to change the world, even in some immeasurable way, or be touched by, changed by, the connection I make with another beautiful person.
But it’s bullshit, of course, thinking that somehow having a “near-death experience”, even one as convoluted and utterly made up as mine should somehow change the world around us. If you’ve got the idea that somehow thinking you’ve very well near died has some sort of life-changing property, get it out of your head right now. That moment, the moments like it that many of have had, or will have, or have heard, or seen in the movies, is in no way phenomenal or spectacular or utterly out of the ordinary. There is nothing different about reality; there is nothing that changes in the world. That moment, and all the other moments before and after it are utterly ordinary. The world goes on, completely unaware and unconcerned. Life goes on.
Life feels more real, sure, but it has always felt this real, and we’ve just gone on ignoring the pressing, suffocating reality of existence. It’s always just been a matter of ignoring the overwhelming presence that life forces upon us.
So has something changed? Have you, have I, been unmade and forged anew? Perhaps. But it’s not like each moment suddenly has more meaning. All that’s changed is that we see the value of each instant passing before us.
If a single second is spent not working towards how you want the world around you to be, or not making a connection with someone you can’t live without, isn’t that a second that’s been wasted? When every instant in time costs the same and this second, this living, breathing piece of time that you and I are both trapped in might be our last, then shouldn’t we be spending our time to make the world the way we want it to be, to craft the life we want, to do amazing things for the amazing people in our life? To not waste what wonderful, spectacular, inconceivably valuable moments we’ve been given, to craft meaning, to forge connections. To make the world into our vision of what we wish it to be.
Is it a lot of pressure? You bet.
Maybe some nights you go to bed convinced that you might very well not wake up in the morning. You go to sleep thinking that this might very be the end, and you know, you damn well know that this day, this now immeasurably valuable day, doesn’t hold up, wasn’t filled to the brim trying to change the world into the way you want it to be, wasn’t spent making the most of those sparks of a connection you have with the ones you love for the briefest of moments, that those moments weren’t just missed, they were wasted, callously discarded, unlovingly destroyed in the pursuit of something that now feels so banal.
There are nights like this. Nights that stretch into the abyss, each second that passes screaming to proclaim their existence, to remind me that I am still alive, still here, and that yet another second has passed that I have let go fallow, not put to good use, not spent making the world, or the life of another, better.