The Museum of Our Lives

Dear Reader,

When I think back to those sunlit summer days, with cool breezes of sailing and evening woodland walks, I remember the people who shared those and various other precious microcosms of space and time with me.

We believed those moments would stretch forever, that laughter echoing across the water was somehow permanent, that the warmth of companionship could be bottled and saved.

But time has scattered us to the four winds, transforming us into different people living different lives with other companions. Those snapshot memories, if viewed today, would reveal strangers where we once knew friends— best friends. The faces remain the same in photographs, but something essential has shifted, like looking at a beloved home that new owners have painted different colors.

This is the cruel mathematics of living: every hello contains its eventual goodbye. Every perfect afternoon carries within it the seed of its own ending. We gather close, hearts full and guards down, knowing somewhere in our bones that this constellation of souls will never align quite the same way again.

Such is life—it keeps moving forward in time’s relentless current, carrying away our most treasured arrangements of people and place. New joys await around each bend, yes, but they come at the cost of what we must leave behind. Each new chapter closes the previous one forever.

This is why we must learn to love with the fierce urgency of the condemned. We must savor moments as they’re occurring, feeling their weight even as they slip through our fingers. We need to embrace our loved ones while we’re still together, knowing that even our most solid relationships are temporary installations in the museum of our lives.

The present moment is all we truly possess. Yesterday lives only in the ache of memory; tomorrow exists only in the flutter of hope. But today—this breath, this heartbeat, this shared glance—this is real. This is ours, for now.

So I encourage you to pause in your busy day and feel the bittersweet beauty of this fleeting instant. Notice how the light streams through your window differently than it did yesterday, than it will tomorrow. Feel the weight of impermanence in your hands. Appreciate the people around you as they are right now—not as they were, not as they might become, but as they exist in this brief, unrepeatable moment before everything changes again. Time will carry us all forward, as it always has. But we can choose to be fully awake to both its gifts and its inevitable losses, holding them together in our hearts like the complex chord they make.