The Beauty of Ephemerality

Why We Should Cherish the Fleetingness of Our Lives

This essay originally appeared in Medium in December 2020. This is a lightly edited version of the piece.

Last year, I struck up a conversation with a man sitting next to me at the bar of a TGIF at Miami International Airport. I never learned his name, nor did he learn mine. Still, we enjoyed nearly an hour-long conversation: we discussed his son’s hesitance to pursue a degree in the humanities, despite his obvious aptitude for writing and his dismal performance in computer science courses. The man sought my advice as a philosophy professor about how to persuade his son to switch paths.

I will probably never see this man again. Yet something was touching to the ephemerality of our encounter. I don’t long to meet him again, but simply enjoy the memory of the pleasurable moment I had with him. I wonder if such moments might help us cope with our own ephemerality. Can the same beauty and poignancy apply to a person’s life as a whole? Is there something to life’s brevity that is worth admiring rather than mourning?

Philosophers often discuss the urgency that facing death lends to our lives. For example, in his magnum opus Being and Time, the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger claims that anxiety is the mood in which we authentically face up to our mortality. He leads into the discussion of anxiety by speaking of the “tranquilizing” effect our everyday talk about death has on us. We say, “one dies,” as though death were “somewhere or other.” By contrast, we feel anxiety when we recognize death as something that belongs to each one of us. In so doing, we free ourselves from the unthinking and average ways of living that limit us. For him, anxiety before death brings us face-to-face with the possibility of becoming authentic.

The connection between authenticity and anxiety has resonated with me. During the periods when I underwent screenings for possible breast cancer, I was reminded of the urgency that our mortality lends to life. We cannot enjoy all the possibilities that infinite time might afford. I cannot exercise all professions, and I cannot forge a relationship with every individual I encounter. There are limits on what I can do in life. Consequently, I am confronted with choices. I can pursue philosophy or leave the field. I can be content with being single or seek a romantic partner. Avoiding making these choices is a way of denying death. This denial lures us into cruising through life without deciding what to live for.

This sense of urgency is valuable, but it has its downside. It casts death as a threat. Because of our mortality, we must avoid living unconsciously and treating our lives as though we had all the time in the world.

But what if we shed some of this death-anxiety in exchange for a more lighthearted attitude?

The way to cultivate this attitude, I believe, lies in acknowledging our contingency. Our lives are filled with contingencies — a chance conversation at the airport or a night spent in the company of strangers. In fact, our lives as a whole are contingent. The encounter between the egg and sperm that laid the ground for my life was a product of chance. While life brings suffering with it, we might also consider pausing to marvel at the sheer miracle of being born and at the opportunity of experiencing life.

Meditating on our contingency gives a positive spin to our mortality. We can cherish each moment in its evanescence. This attitude introduces the mood of love into our awareness of life and death. If we bring this love into our own lives, then we might also value our transience more joyfully. For example, when I attend to the present moment as it passes — for example, watching the colors of the sunset from my apartment — I am filled with delight.

As much as we treasure the value of those things that last — age-old churches and buildings, statues and paintings that have survived disasters and pillages, relics, antique books — we also, less noticeably perhaps,  admire what will inevitably disappear. In fact, our love of flowers speaks to our appreciation of the ephemeral. Even the most realistic of fake flowers fails to conjure our delight in the delicacy of real flowers — and the fragility that comes with it.

Credit: Palav Journo

For many of us, reflecting on death directs us toward the goals we hope to accomplish and the legacy that we want to leave. In my case, it reminds me of the books that I want to write and the writings I hope others will read after I am gone. But this attitude betrays a bias for what endures.

Rather than motivating us to take our futures in hand, as anxiety is supposed to do, loving ourselves in our mortality compels us to attend to what enlivens us in the present moment. Neither orientation — toward the present or future — is superior to the other. We need both in our lives.