This Fleeting Thing Called Life | #Reflections

Why is it, that some days, life moves very fast?

You look up and the day is gone. You blink and the year has changed. The face I see in the mirror is older. The child at home is older and taller. The elderly parent is now more forgetful. My hands have more lines. Just like that, it happens. From one day to the other. Change sneaks in, unannounced.

No drumroll. Just a reminder that time is fleeting.

We think we have the time. To write that letter. To take that trip. To say the thing we mean to say. But time does not wait.

We plan a dinner and save it for later. Then, the person we saved it for, is gone. Maybe not forever. Maybe just somewhere far. But gone, nonetheless. The dinner we planned never happens. The words we wanted to say never got said. Now, all that is left is silence—suspended in thin air.

Seasons change before we can name them. One day, the sky is gold, and the next, it is a dull grey. The tree that bloomed last spring is bare once again. It feels like only a week has passed. Well, not really!

People leave. They don’t always mean to. But they do. They move away, grow up, drift off. Some stay in our phone and some in our head. A few, though live in our heart. The rest become memory.

Sometimes, we forget the sound of their voices. It hurts. But, we move on. No two days are the same. No two days are we the same person that we were.

Life is not a straight road. It has sharp twists and turns. Just when things are fine, it loops back. It snaps. We stumble and fall. Then, rise up again. So much of our lives exist in between these cycles.

There are long nights and short years. There are days that crawl and decades that vanish. We live through both, don’t we?

We think we will remember everything. But, we don’t. The big moments stay with us, hanging on a frame—a wedding, a birth, a farewell, maybe.

But what about the little nameless ones? The quiet coffee on the balcony. The laughter on a random Tuesday. The hug shared on a day, that felt like nothing—until much later, when it feels like everything. Where do those go?

Life is made of the small, random fleeting things. Those in-between moments that just appeared out of nowhere.

We chase things that don’t last. The trends. The job. The car. The applause. We run hard toward them, thinking they will stay. But they fade too. Everything does. That’s the way of it.

Even love changes shape. It doesn’t vanish. It lingers and stretches. Sometimes it slips through our fingers. Sometimes it returns in ways we never expected. That’s life.

Happiness is not loud. It doesn’t come with banners. It often tiptoes…quietly, on a slow morning, in a room filled with sunlight and no noise. We won’t know it then. But we remember it later and feel it in the nooks of our heart and soul, and how the memory of it made us feel on a cold, bleak day.

We lose people. We lose pieces of ourself. But, we gain too. We gain strength. And stories. And stillness and calm. Without having to fight for it. It comes without asking. And sits by our side.

We learn that not everything broken needs fixing. Some things just are. Some people don’t stay. Some dreams don’t come true. But we can always create new ones. And we can forge new bonds, even though they feel different.

Time is not kind. But it is honest. It gives. Then it takes. You and I— we can’t bargain with it. We can only walk with it, hand in hand, as long as it lets us.

Grief teaches you that. And so does love.

There is beauty in all things temporal. Especially those that don’t last. The falling leaf. The sunset. The changing colours of the sky. The final page of a favourite book. We may not be able to hold them. But we can feel them seated, deeply, within us, undisturbed.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe, that’s all that we need to know to understand life. We are all here for a blink. One brief flicker. And in that time, we try to build something. A life. A connection. A meaning.

We look for answers. Most of the time, we don’t find them. But we find each other. And that can be enough. So we keep going. Through the mess. Through the ache and the joy and the ordinary days that make up most of it.

We try to live with our eyes open. To notice. To care. To feel something real. Because life — this fleeting, fragile thing— asks only one thing of us—to be here and now.

As someone once said – “Imagine reading a book with no way to turn the page back. How would you read it?”

That’s Life!