Earlier this week, a friend sent me a photograph that felt like it was from a different life.
Event Context
Looking at that photograph, I found myself wondering: When did those rituals stop?
I didn’t tell her one evening that that was the last funny story I would cook up on the fly. My daughter didn’t wake up one morning and announce she was done with running in the sand. I don’t remember deciding to hand over those hours to work or to screens.
Life happened. It moved on.
Her school work became more demanding. My workday expanded. Evenings acquired other rhythms. And without any of us noticing, a phase of our lives quietly ended.
So many phases have ended in this way. Wasn’t it just yesterday that my friends and I played football every evening, and cricket with the boys across the street on Sundays?
It’s full of endings, isn’t it, this life of ours? And before one knows it, a whole phase has “happened”, past tense.
Perhaps that is why we make such a big deal of new beginnings. New job. First salary. Wedding. New home. Anniversaries. Birthdays. We photograph them, celebrate them, mark the dates. They give us something with which to map the years.
Endings are different. Life has a way of concealing them. We have an even worse way of helping it along.
Faced with a choice between what is meaningful and what is immediately comfortable, we are wired to reach for comfort. We are stymied by those hopelessly seductive words: “Not today.”
We assume because something has happened many times before, it will happen many times again. In this way, we mistake routine for certainty and take it for granted, not accounting for the cruel accumulation of minutes, hours and days.
Match Outlook
Back then, we never thought of it as creating memories. We were just squabbling over who had played badly; making plans for the next game; arguing about LBWs and whose turn it was at the bat.
I certainly don’t remember when we played the last game together. If someone had asked me then, I would have said we were just skipping an evening, or a random Sunday.
Life has this way of lulling us into complacency. Until I saw that image, I didn’t really understand people who said “treasure the everyday”. It felt like Instagram speak.
Now, I am thinking back to colleagues I met every day for years, had lunch with and really confided in; until one day they changed jobs and were simply gone. Neighbours I shared chai with every evening, until life decided the routine must change.
We’ll make the phone call “tomorrow”. Visit our parents “next weekend”. Spend time with the kids after answering “one more email”. Each decision feels perfectly reasonable. None feels like a choice that will alter the years.
It is only later that the heartbreak shows up. The daughter running on the beach is in her late teens. There will be no more ice-cream-and-silly-stories. The friend we meant to call is no longer a friend, just a man one used to know.
I don’t believe the answer is to “live every day like it’s your last”. That would be quite insane. But what if we acknowledged, in an everyday way, that certain tomorrows may not happen? That the most important moments may come disguised as routine, and leave exactly the same way, unless we’re careful?
How would one do this? Perhaps we could start with a new thumb rule: If this was the last time I could reach out to this person, would I still put comfort first?
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)
