A Life For Thanksgiving

I think I’m somewhere over Greenland. Apparently heading over the North Pole is the fastest route from New York City to Hong Kong. Who knew?

You think I’m kidding. Well, of course, by the time this little digital postcard lights your liquid crystals I’ll be long gone from the artic airspace. But at this moment, I hover over Santa’s elves who are still recovering from 3:00 AM Black Friday doorbusters.

Behind me I leave seven days home, my only days home after this first year of our peregrination. My trip to Atlanta to participate in ApacheCon two weeks ago allowed me the chance to steal away for Thanksgiving which has long been my favorite holiday. With such little time to manage business, see family and friends, and consume respectable quantities of turkey, stuffing and that green bean casserole with the cruchy stuff on top, my Pittsburgh layover took on a life of its own.

A life of its own. A year of life compressed in one week. One week to live.

I felt it sitting in my aunt and uncle’s living room surrounded by family after the Thanksgiving meal. I felt it while driving to and from business appointments rushing to prepare taxes and financial statements. I felt it while sorting through one year of offers for credit cards and student loan consolidations which had piled up in my in-law’s mailbox. It was the encompassing sense of immediacy, the pressure of the present and the steady trickle of now becoming yesterday.

As dramatic as it sounds, let’s be honest with one another. You know what I’m talking about. Perhaps I feel it more distinctly at the moment at 35,000 feet. Certainly spending a week with loved ones without knowing when I would see them next brings a particular potent poignancy to the emotion. Neices and nephews will be born over the next few months whom I may not see until they are a year or two old. Appropriately enough my visit ended with my high school ten year reunion. It could easily be another ten years, if ever, that I get the opportunity to laugh in person with those former companions and classmates. So please pardon my melodrama for a moment.

We live our lives in many ways, but inevitably part of the shared experience of human life is the challenge and art of turning time into worthwhile memory. Be it holidays, reunions or no-nonsense business meetings, we seek to structure the limited resource of time to best capture and transform it. The struggle to create permanence in a temporary world has lead to some of our most inspiring monuments. The Great Wall of China seems much more real than the simple sandcastles Maeli, Jenny and I have built on Lamma’s humble beach. Nevertheless, both crumble. Taken to its ultimate end, this earth will someday find a home in the belly of our sun, these elements born of dying stars will return to a dying star.

Jenny and I have talked about the inevitably of temporariness a lot over this last year. The conversation can leave one nihilistic. But more often than not, I’ve found it simply re-affirming the signficance of the present. The moment of now is the only eternal we experience in this life, the one unchanging constant, the one thread that ties the memories of the past with the promises of the future. When I am most awake and aware, I find myself with a deep appreciatation of the moment at hand. It’s at such times that I feel most alive and the fading day loses its bittersweatness and I am content.

It’s with that mindset I tried to appreciate this Thankgiving, tried to savor each moment, unwilling to waste it. My 2,600 unread emails give witness to my effort. And while I still left things undone, people unseen and food uneaten, I came away with a week well lived. My hope is that I carry that odd mix of urgency and calm with me, over the artic, over Russia and China and back to the warm, tropical island I now call home. So as that Pacific sun invites me to lazily let the days melt away, to let the months and hours curl around me in my office as I tap away my life on a keyboard, I won’t let time pass unused or unappreciated.