Month: October 2012

Last night, I slept in my study with the window open.

Ella, my cat, curled in my lap as I listened to the rain from my leather chair. I moved in and out of sleep, and each time I woke to shift positions, two things happened.

The first is that Ella would get up, circle, and find a new nook in my lap to sleep in.

The second is that I would try to find the rain.

The rain was there – of course, it was a hurricane after all – but I found myself reaching through my sleep-addled brain to listen to it. As if hearing the rain as it hit the trees and creek outside were a touchstone I needed.

(that I put up with a cat in my lap all night tells me that I am somewhat attached to the beast, as I usually avoid anything that will affect my sleep; that I found myself searching for the rain tells me that I spent too much time as a child playing in the rain and may be a re-incarnated rain god)

In one version of Greek mythology, nymphs spend each day in an orgy of wine and wickedness only to fall asleep and rise anew the next morning with no memory of the day before.

Youth is like that.

We are immortal in our youth, invincible. We fall often, mistaking impermanence for beauty, experience for wisdom.

And we are not wrong in that. At least, not yet.

Because this is how youth is meant to be spent – it is not a thing to hoard: the longer we try to hold on to it the faster it slips through our fingers. Time is the one commodity we cannot overspend on. It can’t be saved. It can only be lived as thoroughly as possible.

And it is better spent without extensive worry or weight. Consequence will follow – it must always follow – but we don’t have to chase it.

Because age and wisdom and second-guessing will come to dodge our heels; we will begin to use the word naivete as a sort of taunt, or a curse, but it will be born of jealousy.

Because we once lived more fully.

Before we knew better.