The Sum of a Life
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Hello, sweet human beings, and welcome to THE F WORD, your weekly newsletter on Failure and all it encompasses.
Here we are, on week 24 of this newsletter, and I’m still blown away that you’re still effing here. Thank you so much to everyone who has ridden this runaway train, who has joined in on these weekly musings, who has shared this little publication with someone you know or supported me with a paid subscription.
“I’d like to thank God and the Academy!!!”
I think we are all inherently connected through this complicated, messy thing called “life”, and this newsletter is my way of reaching out into the vast expanse of the universe and the internet and seeking some type of connection through these words.
(***side note: which is a scarier place—the universe or the interwebs?!?! GO!)
And that—this search for meaning, for connection, for understanding—brings us to our topic today!
**Announcer Voice**:
Unanswered questions! Rhetorical devices! Overly-analytical pontification!
This week, on THE F WORD:
The in-between moments!
There are moments in-between the pictures, the videos, the memories. When one moment is “worthy” of a video, what happened before you pressed play, and after you pressed stop? What are the moments that get us from one memory to the next, that hold up our very existence, that make up our lives, but are still, by definition, unmemorable? We often note the first step on the staircase and the last one, but what about the ones in-between?
Or, to use another “step” metaphor:
We know how to assign importance or meaning to end results: these would be the rungs on the ladder of our lives. what about the space in-between the rungs? The air? The nothingness that you still have to pass over to get to the next rung? What is that space made of?
What exists as the –ing before the –ed?
When does the doing become the done?
When there is a specific and measurable consequence or product, this is much easier to quantify. When does reading become read? The book is read when the last page is finished. When does eating become the eaten? The dish is eaten when the food is gone.
But when there is not a specific and measurable consequence, as in between all of the in-between moments, what exists there? Is there any meaning in moments that are not going to be remembered? How do we know when the -ing has become the -ed? When is the novel “finished” being written? When is an author done writing? When do the in-between moments amount to anything? And, do these in-between moments ever matter?
If they each individually hold no meaning to a person’s life (the ten steps I took to sit at this table may lead to something, but they, themselves, have absolutely no meaning as isolated moments). How can a life have meaning when all of these meaningless moments are grouped together?
This is much as a song:
At what point does it stop being a collection of individual notes and amount to something with meaning?
And— let’s piss off the mathematicians!
This is where division and multiplication completely fail us. Each individual note does not hold the equal distribution of value that an entire song can have.
If being “emotionally moved” could be measured on a scale (as in a graph, not a musical scale, buh dum tish), there can be more summative value in the entire song than is in each of the individual parts of it. If we assign a value of “1” to each note, and there are, say, 12 notes that are used in a song, a song could and will have much more meaning than a value of “12.”
(MUSICIAN FRIENDS, BACK ME UP HERE).
Where does the power of a song come from, if the power of a song is always greater than the power behind each individual note? How can this be?! WHERE DOES THAT MEANING COME FROM?!?!? If you stopped-and-searched every in-between moment for meaning, what would you find?
Chapstick? Pocket lint? Spare change? WHERE ARE THEY HIDING THE GOD DAMN JEWELRY?!?!
The sum of a life is not equal to the amount of value in every in-between moment. So where is the beauty created? Where is the value created? Where is the meaning created?
We are tangibly living within seconds that are intangible. These seconds are the ghosts among us.
We move between these two states constantly. The choices we make, as thoughts themselves, are nothing more than whispers in our minds. These whispers lead to action; something tangible. For example:
Thought
ACTION
I need a napkin —> I will get one —> I RISE FROM THE TABLE —> I WALK TO THE NAPKIN STATION —> I GRAB A NAPKIN —> I BOW AND HOLD FOR APPLAUSE
(that last one was a joke).
That intangible thought is transferred into a physical experience —> the very-tangible getting-of-the-napkin —> which then gets turned into SOMETHING INTANGIBLE AGAIN! It becomes a memory.
In this way, we are always living one step from death—every thought, intangible, every breath, then, nothingness. We are living in an ice cream sandwich of Death.
Death, as nothingness. Also, death, as an end, as the marker of change. Every inhale: bringing something in, and exhale: expelling CO2 from the body, leaving nothing where something was before. Every breath: a change of states. Every death: a goodbye to the present moment, which we can never reclaim.
As for the “meaning” of it all:
The only thing clear is that the intangible isn’t always meaningless: sometimes it is rife with meaning. Pain. Joy. Love. Embarrassment. Hatred. We have emotional reactions to intangible thoughts all the time.
Ultimately, we are just living in one big mess of....something. One big tangled web of existence and time and the constant relationship between intangible/tangible. Between meaning/meaningless.
And Ultimately^2:
Life is worth more than the summation of its parts.
Thanks for reading.
Until next week!
Love, Light, and Miracle Whip,
Steph x