When you step back and look at the brevity of a lifetime, days, months, and years seem like nothing more than clumsily concatenated moments. Things and people and places that you hold so closely at one time can vanish in the blink of an eye. What you think might matter to you in the next ten years could be the most trivial of focal points when it’s actually ten years from now. Time is a cruelly revolving door; we are always changing and our spheres of influence are always changing and the world around us is always changing. There is simply no room in the universe for people to desperately cling to any matter and beg it not to change. The past is from where we learn; the future is where we can put our knowledge to the test. The only place where we can healthily, actively live is in the present; otherwise you’re living a life chained down by the misdemeanors of your past and the haunting ambiguities of your future. But the best tool we are given to be happy in life is the present; a sort of joie de vivre mindset is absolutely necessary to really live, and I don’t mean go day-in and day-out, but really live. To actually look at flowers with both eyes focused on the petals and to understand what it means to feel hot and cold and to close your eyes and inhale the scent of something freshly baked and to hold hands with another human being and mean it. It’s an entirely possible feat to go an entire lifetime without living purposefully. To live truly and fully and genuinely is to live in moments, to emerge from your own stream of consciousness and embrace every single thing in the world around you. Life is just a chain of moments connected randomly by time. So in order to live, you’ve got to create moments worth remembering, moments by which you can define your own existence. You live as long as you let yourself live; you can live for an eternity or you can trap yourself in your mind for even longer than that. It comes down to whatever you will yourself to do.