LIFE IS SHORT
That life is short is so blindingly obvious to most of us that it’s become a cliché. I’m not sure where the line between truth and cliché is, but it’s thin. And I’m not sure that we can be free of the truth of things, or free from the chance to act on them, merely by calling them cliché. Sometimes I wonder if we call things cliché in order to excuse ourselves from thinking about them.
Our days are numbered, folks. Not only are they limited, we have no idea exactly how many days remain in the storehouse. Our time here is not merely a resource to be managed. It is all we have, and it’s insanely beautiful at times, but it’s short.
One of the gifts of photography is the way it makes us conscious of time. Time is one of our raw materials. Our exposures are measured, in part, in fractions of a second. Sometimes so fast the shutter is closed before you know it’s open. The best photographs also rely on the strength, beauty, and universality of a particular moment. Blink and it’s gone, but when photographed it remains, frozen in space and time, to consider for as long as the print remains. Photography helps those who are willing to see the moments we’d otherwise miss. And moments are important because the way we live our moments is the way we live our days, our lives. Photographs—the best of them, at any rate—honour the moments, and they speak to us because we know how limited these moments are. Time is limited and we’ve no idea how much of it we have, so the sooner we cherish and redeem it, the better.
Time is not money. If time were money we could borrow it. We could steal it. We could bank it and see our days compounded. We can’t. We can live it. We can use it to do the thing we are here for, or we can waste it. But we can do little else with it because it’s not ours to control. It’s given to us in unspecified measure to wring from it what we can.
I am strongly motivated by the brevity of life, not because I fear its end (though like Woody Allen, I’d rather achieve immortality by not dying than through my work), but because, simply, it will end. What I control is how deeply I live my days, not how long. But I think somewhere along the way the urge to live deeply gets subverted.
We settle. We find a path of lesser resistance and we take the deal, because it’s easier to be safe. It’s easier to fit in. We’d rather tiptoe through life and make it safely through, because we seem to have willingly forgotten that there’s no reward in making it unscathed to our funeral.
Why we take the deal in the first place is another discussion to be had later, because it’s got a lot to do with fear and the voices we listen to, but it’s important to realize we’ve settled. There’s not a week goes by that someone doesn’t tell me they envy my life (and by that they usually mean the good bits, the public bits of my story; few have told me they desperately want to take the path I’ve taken to get here) and that they wish they could do what I do. And I get it. I really do. But what they seem to mean is that they want what I have without paying the price I’ve paid to get here. I know people want to change the world and create great art and live the dream and so on. So do I. But some want to do so without giving up what is demanded, by life, in exchange. Were life longer I might have time to do it all, but I don’t, and so I make choices: do I do this, or do I do that? Seldom am I given a choice to do both. I don’t own a home. My freedom from mortgage payments and maintenance issues frees me to travel. Some can do both. I can’t. I’ve made a choice. I’d rather have a plane ticket to Bali than a big screen television. But to the one who sees no choice but to keep up with their neighbors, the television comes first and the plane ticket remains a dream. For me, if owning the latest car or appliance means I give up the experience of travel, and the freedom to do my work, it comes at too high a cost. Most of us love the idea of having a choice until we’re told that choice means giving up one to have another. Some don’t realize it is a choice.
Life will go by so fast it’ll make our aged heads spin when we get to the end. But it’s not only short, it’s uncertain. When I graduated from high school we were already talking about careers and what we’d do when we retired. Not once did we say, “If we retire”—we treated it as a given. We would retire and in health enough to enjoy the dreams we’d set aside for that retirement. But life has this way of getting in the way of deferred dreams. Leukemia arrives uninvited. A headache becomes a brain tumour that becomes a fight against a possibility we never imagined until it’s clear the dreams we saved for later will never happen. I don’t mean to be morbid but we live, many of us, in a culture that lives in perpetual denial of the inevitable, and it’s costing us our dreams. You can’t bank your time. The time, as it has always been, is only now.
That my days are numbered forces me to choose carefully how I spend them. And because my life—even if I live to 120—will seem so heartbreakingly short, I will choose not only what I do with my life, but how I do it.
I know. It sounds so selfish. We’ve been taught to keep our heads down. We’ve been taught not to be selfish. Many of us are also taught to respect the choices of others, and to give them the dignity of living their lives on their own terms. We’re taught to extend forgiveness, to be kind. We’re taught to love others as we love ourselves. But the moment we try to love ourselves the way we’re taught to love others we’re chastised: “Don’t be so selfish.”
And yes, sometimes they’re right. But often they aren’t, and the admonition against selfishness has become a perverse reversal of things. The most loving people I know find that love first within themselves. It is the self-loathing who abhor others. It’s the ones who won’t respect themselves that don’t respect others. It is the ones who don’t allow themselves to risk and dream and live extraordinary, unconventional lives who discourage others from the same.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I think it’s time we took back a healthy regard for selfishness. In fact, I’ll go one better (in for a penny, in for a pound, right?): I think it’s time we made ourselves a priority. To do otherwise is to expect a bountiful yield from a garden we’ve neither planted nor tended. I’m not suggesting we allow ourselves to become egomaniacs, just that we extend the same love and grace to ourselves that we do to others, and to do so first so we have a place from which to love and respect others. That we respect ourselves and allow ourselves the same chance to live our dreams as we allow others. Only when we take back the responsibility to make our own choices—to live on our terms—do we have a place for extraordinary generosity, profound kindness, and the acts of heroism of which we’re capable, and of which others will one day call selfless.
I’m not looking to justify a life of what I would have once called selfishness; I’m looking for a healthy place to put myself in this world. A place to stand. A place from which to love and do what I have been called, by Life, to do. A place to do good, to love boldly and without fear. A place to be generous and hospitable, and to create my art without shame in the days I have allotted to me. A place to become everything I can be, without settling for anything less. A place from which I can find the leverage to make the same things happen in the lives of those I love. Life is too short to do anything else, and too beautiful not to fight hard to be a part of it.