On borrowed time

Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.
These veins carried
my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places
without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.

(Pablo Neruda)

These lines resonate as I write. Life happened to me not in a grand, orchestrated symphony, but in fragments, breaths, and years that somehow blurred together even as they carved themselves into memory. Each revolution around the sun, a tapestry of beauty, loss, joy, sorrow, despair, and wonder – all threaded together by time’s relentless needle.

Recently, I found myself thinking of a scene from Peggy Sue Got Married, where the protagonist asks her grandfather about regrets and changes. His response – that he would have taken better care of his teeth – carries a wisdom that only age can fully appreciate.

The nature of beauty itself has transformed with time. In my youth, it was a simple pleasure, uncomplicated and bright. Now it carries a bittersweet edge that cuts deeper, moves me to unexpected tears. Beauty has become fuller, more complex, because it carries within it the weight of temporality – of what has been and what will never be again. Each sunset holds not just its own splendor, but echoes of all the sunsets I’ve witnessed and those I’ve missed while busy with the necessary trappings of modern life.

Through our twenties and thirties, life feels like a constant acceleration, marked by clear milestones – degrees earned, careers launched, marriages celebrated, children welcomed, homes established. These are times of perpetual motion, of purpose that feels both urgent and clear. We move through the world certain of our ability to reshape it, our energy seemingly limitless, our potential unbounded.

But the forties slip by like water through cupped hands, and our vulnerability begins to show. In midlife, as silver threads appear in our hair, and we notice the first hints of our mortality in creaking joints and fading eyesight, life’s rewards and struggles shift inward. This becomes the time to ask, with perhaps half to two-thirds of our journey complete: What truly matters? What purpose might we serve in the time that remains?

The daily calculus becomes starker: every choice carries an opportunity cost. Time invested in one pursuit means another left unexplored. Energy devoted to a late night finishing a budget might mean missing a child’s fleeting moments of wonder. Money saved for tomorrow might mean experiences foregone today.

Here lies the essential paradox of aging: my curiosity expands even as I become more acutely aware of knowledge’s limits. It is both a blessing and a burden, but I know no other way to exist. There is so much to know, so much to experience in this life of finite duration. Yet I’ve learned that the deepest wisdom often comes not from what we acquire or achieve, but from what we give and receive from others.

Our task, then, is to create memories – for ourselves and others. To find the causes where we can make a difference, however small. To cherish the people to whom we matter, and to embrace joy in all its transient glory. In the end, we are all footnotes in each other’s stories.

I am profoundly grateful to my family, who daily teach me what it means to love and live for something beyond myself. Through them, I’ve come to understand that gratitude is the only appropriate response to this fleeting, wondrous existence.

Life is precious precisely because it is ephemeral – the casual conversations, the small kindnesses, the shared laughter matter as much as any grand achievement. Our personal joys and sorrows are but drops of water on a lotus leaf compared to the vast ocean of collective human experience.

I find myself returning often to these words by Hokusai, the great Japanese painter who embodied such remarkable humility, optimism, and dedication to perpetual improvement:

“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.”

What a privilege it has been to have made it this far– still asking, still seeking, still yearning for one more drop from honey, from twilight, from life itself. What a gift it has been to witness this unfolding– each moment carrying within it the seeds of the next, each understanding opening doors to what may finally lead to a deeper wisdom.