On Life, Love and Nephews
Two things changed my world as I know it this weekend, I became an Uncle and somebody I care about deeply told me that they didn’t believe they wouldn’t live to be old.
This morning as I sit on (another) plane on the way back home, these emotions both run at errant discourse to my own feelings on life, love and children that I felt my most appropriate form of release would be to write about it.
Today I write to you as a man both elated and scared…
I can only begin to share with you the deep emotional transition that occurred in my heart when I first laid my eyes on darling Daniel on Thursday night. From climbing onto the plane a man without ties to his familys looming heritage to learning that my darling nephew had been born, born into a world as the first grandson of his generation and as the man that would carry the legacy of our family name into the next, I couldn’t help but allow myself to be totally awed and overwhelmed by this moment of clarity and peace.
To stare at my darling nephew and to feel the heat rise in my neck and chest, to feel and see the slow, rhythmic bumping of his tiny chest and to connect with life, real life on such an intimate level and I was moved beyond recognition.
I wrapped my arms tightly around my brother and I wept inside for the blessed moment that bought him safely into this world, fingers and toes in all the right places and crying in a way that only babies can cry. I wept inside for the years of my life that I have lived and not loved, for the moments that i’ve let roll by and for the emotions that i’ve taught myself are not OK to feel. I wept inside because my darling nephew represents the renewal, the truth and the beauty that is life, embodied and emblazened in a coocooned body of thin flesh, dazzling eyes and a soul that deserves all my protection in the world.
To understand true happiness one needs to recognise that they’re no in control of it and to respect that it’s not something you choose, it’s something you are. To understand how I currently feel when I think of my darling nephew is akin to true happiness. Happiness that resides in my soul, happiness that makes me protective and guarded, happiness that lets me sit on a plane and shed gentle tears of much-dreamed of bliss and peacefulness.
The juxtposition of life is the life without, about expiration and about the disembodiment of the mind and soul from the body. It’s death.
I once listened to a profound piece of advice. Death is never dignified. Only in life is there dignity and you need to cherish it for all that it embodies.
Life is always brief, always early and reduces it’s receiver to a body of flesh, a brain without life, a heart wiithout rhythym and soul without a home.
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So I found it quite profound that I heard someone I care about tell me that she expected her life to expire early, and that this had no impact on her daily life.
Now this person doesn’t reduce the quality of her life or reset her expectations around the assumption that her life will be short, though I sit here today in wonderment of how a beautiful soul comes to the logical (and some would say reverent) belief that they will expire, a flame extinguished without prejudice and to leave an enitre universe surrounding them, passionately wishing that life hadn’t been so cruel.
I sit here today with a plea to my fellow man, and subseuqently to this girl, a plea to live passionately and resolutely. To live through fear and humour and angst and suffering and to come out the other side.
Cheat death I say. Cheat the moments that shorten it. Cheat life and live by your own rules.
….
There’s something this person doesn’t know about me yet. I felt exactly the same way for almost my entire life. I thought that my time was going to be short. Not exciting or worldly, but cut short by some irrelevant event, my body and mind seperated in a brief (yet peaceful) moment of pain followed by an endless sea of a universe without fear.
As somebody who has lived life and has believed that it will be shortened, I know that it changes your perspective. I know that it changes your outlook and I know that it makes you a different person. Life is harmony between several billions moments of random and 1 moment of joy wrapped into a tightly spun ball. We all look at the other side of the fence and believe that we should do something better, be something better, live more acutely and ultimately be a better person. But what if life isn’t that complex. What if it’s just about being alive……
So on this fateful day, I realise that I am having a moment of clarity. As I sit here in front of my keyboard, I realise right this very second that I just found something that I need to do.
I need to shohw this person *life*…..
And to my darling new nephew, without even knowing it you just showed me that life is nothing but possibility….
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