The story we share.
The spaces we've created.
The stress we brought our mother.
The Guitar Hero duels, heated NBA 2K and Madden NFL matchups.
Every last vent session and purposeful processing that has taken place over FaceTime.
And that's just the two of us... but it also trickles down to my individual life, and the lives of those I love and live alongside too.
Every word I've ever written or idea I've expressed. Every joke I've ever told. Every moment captured between me and my community. Every creative achievement, word of wisdom, video shared, even something as simple as small moments of laughter.
Every hug or handshake exchanged.
Every "I love you" that has left my lips or was somehow spoken to me.
It could've never been.
I don't say this in a depressive, sad way.
I say it sentimentally to give context to why I care so much about life, and why I love so deeply the people I've been privileged to live alongside.
In recent years, I've come to view my brother and me as Time Thieves.
Living on borrowed moments that, by all accounts, weren't even supposed to exist.
Every second we're here is a second we've stolen from impossibility and its odds.
For these reasons and many more, we choose to live with tenacity and rebelliously joyful spirits — taking back time and making moments as magical as we can.
Seeing our existence as part of a divine plan.
Knowing that life can't have its way, even when it tries to draw its own line in the sand.
My mother, my brother, and I are proof that miracles don't always glisten with glamour or come packed with a punch.
Sometimes, they arrive quietly.
Like a clock resetting itself.
And if you listen closely, you'll hear the tick of the seconds we keep stealing.
Because time is a gift we were never supposed to have.
So, what does this have to do with you?
What if you viewed yourself, your family, and your friends the same way?
With the finite nature of time and the fragility of humanity, why wouldn't you attempt to be present in every moment with your people, while you have them?
Why wouldn't you be patient on the first date?
Why wouldn't you look at your spouse with the same sincerity and excited eyes — the way you did in your youth — even though you've been together for so long?
Why wouldn't you stop scrolling during a film or television show to appreciate the art that someone else created for your entertainment?
Why wouldn't you live with intention and purpose, knowing the clock is ticking on all our existences, and accept that the thing that makes it meaningful is how we lean into what we love?
It's becoming more and more difficult by the day to measure how much we mean our "I love you" moments... because our words only mean as much as what we're willing to do when our comfort is compromised.
"I love you" holds a different type of weight when you measure its relationship to time and attention.
Oliver Burkeman said it best in his book Four Thousand Weeks:
To describe attention as a "resource" is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals — such as food, money, and electricity — are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it's possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.
At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. When you pay attention to something you don't especially value, it's not an exaggeration to say that you're paying with your life.1
The profound part of this is that all this time when we were told to pay attention, we missed the fact that the phrase quite literally means what it says.
After all, attention is the purest form of intimacy. One of the most meaningful ways that we can love someone is by giving them the thing most valuable to us — our lives.
The people right in front of us every day are worth our attention.
Sometimes we say I love you and we don't actually mean it because our love is best expressed in what we do when inconvenienced.
We ought not be people who miss the message until the messenger is missing. We ought to act in such a way that devotes days, hours, minutes, and seconds of our lives to appreciating our people while we have them.
My brother and I are miracles (to say the least), but in more than one way, many of us are miracles too. We're all living the tale of time thieves — stealing precious seconds with our people.
So, before you speak your next "I love you," stop and consider where it's coming from and why you're saying it. Handle the hard truth of how you're giving the gift of yourself to someone and why they're so special to you.
Maybe you'll see them in a way you've never seen them before and let your actions be informed by the finite nature of time and the necessity of meaning what you say, when you say it.
Shalom.
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