I like the word ephemeral, it paints the picture of temporary.
Whenever I hear the word ephemeral, I imagine lying on a bed. Depending on how you lay and rest, the bed takes shape to your body. Once you get up, the bed reforms and puffs back up, forgetting what was there. Towards the end of the night, we all shift around in our beds to find the sweet spot to sleep. Every night we do this and every time the sweet spots change. The bed still conforms whether I sleep on my side, back, or sometimes my belly—with arms on my sides, below my pillow, flailing all over the place—one leg curled inwards, straightened at some weird angle, or even crossed over the other. Most of the time when I wake up, I don’t exactly know how I fell asleep, it just happens. And whenever I try to force myself to sleep a in certain way, I usually can’t sleep.
I feel ephemerality heavily in relationships, especially the best and most cherished ones. There are periods where we could talk all day and night, detailing our days and never skipping a step we take—but there are times where we don’t talk for weeks and sometimes months. Whenever we catch up, there’s always a new shape, something weird and new about you, or something important that I funnily forgot. Whatever it is, I can’t stop myself from loving who they are and what they become. Every version of them is the right one for themselves and the right one for me.
Beauty is ephemeral. I love listening to my favorite and seasonal contemporary classical pieces. Most times, I’m brought back to landscapes and scenes that can only be imagined while luckily listening to them on shuffle against hundreds of songs. These scenes always change depending on what happens in my life—maybe I imagine it’s raining because I’m sad or maybe I imagine myself walking down a peaceful, gentrified, Chicago city-block on a calm autumn night just because it’s 9pm in real life—but the song sounds perfectly the same. Whenever I go to a museum or an art exhibit, it’s rare for me to find something that I truly like and find interesting—I mean everything there is obviously good, but not everything speaks to me. I take pictures of some pieces and never look at those same pictures ever again, but the ones that I love are ones that I can remember photographically: Ruth Asawa’s Poppy painting. I’m reminded of it rarely, only when I’m thinking of favorites. Every time I look at it online, it never feels or looks the same as it did in person, mostly because I don’t exactly remember every detail, but I viscerally know that it was ethereal up-close. I’ll also be the 4 billionth guy to say this, I like seeing pretty women passing by—not just because I’m single, but because we all get old. You’ll never look as pretty or handsome like this in the next 40 years and I just think it’s a disservice to the world and yourself to not reach your own standard of beauty. Everyone’s beauty is different, but it’s so easy to enjoy and discern when people progress, grasp, and finally maintain it for as long as they can.
Ephemerality is implicit. If you mention that love, beauty, money, and the walks of life are explicitly temporary, you’re ruining the party of life. I crashed the party somewhat in this post, but who cares. No one wants to know that their love isn’t actually forever, that they’ll both die one day. No one wants to know that their skincare only does so much, that they’ll wrinkle and gray. No one wants to know that their money saved or made will be meaningless in death, or that the money they spend on extravagance should’ve been used for a future-longer-lasting-thing. No one wants to know that a career or job is temporary, that it’s all just transactional, or even better—professional. We already know that life is short, it sucks when it’s serious and forced.
Ephemerality is a great guide. I love knowing that every day is different—that I can continue to fill in the same shapes that I like and deepen them, or forget and retry shapes that don’t feel good in the moment or in the future. It gives me an intuition that isn’t sycophantic, but similarly agreeable. When making decisions, I get to test how the ground feels as I trace the shape of a road. No matter what I choose and where I go, the warmth of ephemerality makes me believe that the decisions I make are always the right ones. Half the time, the decisions are consciously or surprising bad, but there’s still a road to travel with no end in sight. On the better half, the decisions reveal their flaws down the line too. If there was a visible end, then the bad decisions would suck and hurt ten times more— and the good decisions two times more. Thankfully, I’m short-sighted, stubborn, stupid, and forgetful. In other words, explicitly implicit.
ruth asawa’s poppy