Cherry Blossoms

I think one of the strangest things about getting older is realizing how much of life disappears without our noticing it.

There are periods of my life that I can see so clearly now. Certain houses. Certain rooms. People I knew. Music I was listening to. The way the light looked at a particular time of year. At the time, none of it seemed especially important. It was simply where I was. I was probably thinking about what came next, what I wanted to change, what I was waiting for. Now I would give almost anything to step back into some of those ordinary moments for five minutes.

I once came across a quote that said something like, “These are the good old days. We just don’t know it yet.” I don’t remember who said it, but the older I get, the more I understand it.

We have a tendency to recognize the value of things only after they are gone.

We look back at another period of our lives and remember what was beautiful about it. We forget much of the boredom, irritation, uncertainty, and anxiety. What remains are fragments. A song. A smell. A season. Someone sitting across the table from us who is no longer there. A place that doesn’t exist anymore. And suddenly we understand that what seemed completely ordinary was actually temporary.

The problem is that the present moment feels ordinary too.

That is what makes it so easy to overlook.

We imagine that nostalgia belongs to some special period behind us, while the present is merely the hallway we are walking through on the way to something else. But ten or twenty years from now, there is a good chance we will remember this period in exactly the same way. We will remember things we barely notice now. The room we are sitting in. The people we talk to every day. The animals sleeping beside us. The music we are listening to. The body we currently complain about getting older. Even the problems that seem enormous right now may someday become part of a world we strangely miss.

That realization has changed the way I think about presence.

Presence is usually talked about as though it is some spiritual achievement. Something we accomplish through meditation or years of practice. But lately I think of it much more simply. Presence is refusing to miss your own life while it is happening.

It is paying attention before memory forces you to.

The Japanese have understood something about this for a very long time. Part of the symbolic power of the cherry blossom comes from the fact that its beauty does not last. The blossoms appear, everything becomes breathtaking for a brief period, and then they fall. Their impermanence is not something separate from their beauty. It is part of what makes them beautiful.

If cherry blossoms lasted forever, we would eventually stop looking at them.

Life is like that.

Last year’s cherry blossoms were beautiful. We may remember them with affection. We may even wish we could see them again. But if we spend this spring thinking only about last spring, we will miss the blossoms directly in front of us.

Nostalgia can become another way of being absent.

There is nothing wrong with remembering. Memory is one of the great treasures of being alive. But memory becomes a trap when we use the past to avoid the present. We begin comparing what is happening now to some carefully edited version of what happened before. And because memory has removed so much of the inconvenience and uncertainty, the present can never compete.

Meanwhile, another season is passing.

Another year is passing.

Another version of ourselves is passing.

I think that is what I am trying to become more conscious of now. Not in a morbid way, and not by constantly reminding myself that everything I love will eventually disappear. I simply want to stop requiring loss before I recognize value.

I want to appreciate things while they are still here.

There will come a morning when you would give anything to wake up in the house you currently complain about cleaning. There may come a day when you would give anything to hear the voice of someone you currently take for granted. Someday you may look at a photograph of yourself taken today and be amazed by how young you were.

That doesn’t mean we should cling to anything. In fact, it means the opposite.

Clinging comes from wanting something to remain. Presence means allowing it to be exactly what it is while it is here.

See it.

Experience it.

Let it matter.

And then, when the time comes, let it fall.

That is the lesson of the cherry blossom. Its beauty does not ask us to preserve it. It asks us to pay attention.

Maybe these really are the good old days. Maybe every period of our lives was, in some way, the good old days while we were too distracted to notice.

I don’t want to keep discovering the beauty of my life ten years after it happens.

I want to see the blossoms while they are still on the tree.