Chasing the End

There’s a phenomenon in reading a great, page-turner of a book where you can’t finish a page fast enough. The pace of your reading accelerates and you blow through pages quickly, and suddenly you finish the book in a daze. You look up and hours have gone by in the blink of an eye and you realize that you’ve just stepped out of the pages of a time machine.

Life itself is full of moments like this. You can readily rattle off those highlight moments, maybe at a party or traveling or deep in conversation with someone of interest where we are completely transfixed with in that moment. Where does the time go? When we’re so deeply engaged in this moment and entranced by the possibility in the next, what happens?

We aren’t really chasing the end of the story or the life moment, we’re dancing with it. There’s a state of euphoria in reading that great book, watching that great film or participating in that magical moment that transcends time. A life, well-lived, ought to feel very much like this.

We’ve all experienced the opposite. The dull reads, the awkwardly boring work event, the polite small talk with someone who doesn’t share their life force with you. Those times when we sketch imaginative drawings on note pads or silently glance at our phone to be anywhere else but there.

Look, I know every movie can’t be a blockbuster. Every scene can’t transfix you in wonder. How would you even know what bliss was if you didn’t suffer through boring now and then? But life is too short to go through the motions.

We’re all chasing the end of our story. How do we make this time machine vibrate and buzz a little louder on the journey? Our time machines should be bursting at the seams with experiences when we reach the last stop, don’t you think? For when we finish, when we reach that last page of our brilliant life story, we ought to look up in those final seconds and say…

Wow.