Wafting along Upper Street, I had forgotten all about my meeting until a familiar wall of red swooshed past. With a competitive flicker, I picked up my pace. Fingers carving the air, the pavement charged beneath the balls of my feet. A sweet, powerful sensation. The same surprisingly nippy sprint that, on my Year 9 sports day, elicited a gruff compliment from a boy I fancied that still thrills me over twenty years later. The sprint about which, much like my singing voice, I have always been somewhat vain despite having done precisely nothing to deserve it – least of all practice.
I drew level with the bus two stops down and puffed onboard, holding up everyone’s journey as I rummaged for a card. Settling into a seat I watched the privately historic stretch of pavement fade into the distance and thought “well; that’s probably it then.” And it was: the last time I would ever run. A few days later I walked into St Mary’s Hospital and “walked” out again a fortnight after that, minus a major nerve cluster – and with the crutches that I’ll need forever.
I don’t report this to be pitiful (though I did spend an appropriate amount of time feeling sorry for myself – particularly my foot, which now dangles from my recalcitrant leg like a big gristly sausage.) I’m bringing it up because of the curious and profound effect it had to mark such a significant last-time-ever. I look back now, and marvel. That was running. It was glorious. Then it was over.
Youth is peppered with conspicuous firsts. Your first step, word, day at school. First kiss. First real kiss. First time performing other acts across which we shall draw a veil. I still ecstatically remember my first pizza. First ‘proper’ drink (Castaway; yum). My first day at work. The first time I heard Nirvana, and really fell in love (technically, all one experience).
Unless we’re really trying, however, life’s lasts can tend to sneak past, unnoticed. Your last cigarette may have warranted some ceremony. But what about the last swing you’ll ever sit on? The last pear you’ll eat? The last time you’ll watch Dirty Dancing with any real enthusiasm? Few of these lasts will take place consciously unless we’re watching out for them. One day life’s last shag will come and go, but will you recognise it for what it is? What about the last time you read your favourite book? How lovingly will you peel your last carrot?
We often take a hierarchical approach to love and meaning – from the inner to the outer circles of the heart, allocating significance to our experiences accordingly. Yet when I imagine seeing the man who repairs my boots for the very last time, what pathos the occasion takes on. I might feed a horse, pat her velvety nose and wander off – but what if I knew she was the last horse I’d ever see? There’s something in my eye, just imagining it. Perhaps proximity to ‘lasts’ affords us an important glimpse of how unsettlingly marvellous it is to be doing or seeing anything at all. Conscious completion allows us to look back across the finite set of moments and realise that each was as significant as the other – that is to say, absolutely, fundamentally significant. “These are the days of our lives”, a very wise man once said. Boy did he really, really know what he was telling us.
We modern, goal-oriented humans aren’t typically in the business of noticing life, while it’s happening. It is simultaneously our superpower and the greatest tragedy of our existence.
When I was little, my Dad worked in forests, and I often spent my school holidays playing in them by myself. I particularly remember a fantastic house I once made out of sticks. I was so absorbed in construction that by the time it was perfect, it was also time to get in the car and go home. I never even sat in it. I would like to say that back then I was simply in flow and in nature, enjoying the journey with no thought for the destination. But I suspect that even by age 8 I had acquired precisely the opposite habit – becoming so lost in a plan for the future that I forgot to crawl into the beautiful, imperfect present and make the most of it.
Periodically you will read a blog written by or about a young stranger who is dying or dead, urging you to learn from their experience and live life to the fullest, holding your darlings close and appreciating every last cup of tea for the exquisite mystery that it really is. The piece will be viral and you will be among millions to read it, feel momentarily inspired, and then take fuck-all notice. If you are lucky enough to survive a deadly illness, your own path may yield similar insights. In my experience, these likewise will fade all too quickly. If you live long enough, people you love – perhaps people who are too young to die – will die. When this happens, the intense preciousness of mundane, normal old life will become so painfully clear that you know you will never forget again.
And you might not.
But actually, you still might.
Seeing something once isn’t the same as learning it. For the most part, anything we want to learn, we are obliged to practice. Contemplative traditions are very clear on this. The insight we gain through peak life experiences doesn’t sustain itself. That’s why the practical purpose of meditation isn’t to hang out permanently in bliss but to wilfully rehearse the insights you gained when you were in that altered emotional or cognitive state. Fortunately, we don’t have to sit with our eyes closed in order to practice our love of life (or intentionally recall the occasions when we were thunderstruck by the weirdness of being a conscious entity, pottering around on a planet and cutting our creepy toenails and going to ASDA as if it was no big deal.) We are free to take note of the giant miracle we’re living in as often as we want. The more we do so, the closer we weave the fabric of an enchantment that is our most precious inheritance. Through practice, the road less travelled becomes the way we meet the world, and then life is sacred, even when you are emptying the dishwasher, or the cat has been sick on the rug.
(Musicians of all people know that practice makes perfect. But living from job to job we’re often the worst culprits of all, agonizing over the next audition backstage on the contract of our lives. Only the decisive loss of that whole beloved project to cancer was big enough to shift my thinking. And I wish I could really share it – but realistically, will you practice? You’ll practice your violin. But hopefully not just for the sake of getting the next job. One day you’ll put your guitar back in its case and that will be that – and no single time you played it will have been the absolute destination of your efforts. The pinnacle of your career is a fiction. Great or small, none of our accomplishments are ultimately going anywhere. It’s up to us to notice their everyday preciousness before they are gone.)
Every ‘last’ is a small death, and death itself little more than the last last of all. The more vividly we are able to honour both, the better our chances of really knowing life as it is happening. One day all too soon we will say goodbye to each other and to life for the very last time. But hopefully it won’t be the first time we have really noticed how suspiciously magical it was to be here together, ever, at all.
