What Remains Part 5: The Mundane

A renewed practice of mindfulness and the guidance of ancient philosophies had helped me find a measure of peace with impermanence. But I knew this stillness would one day be tested by the blows of chance and circumstance. I held no illusion that I could be a bulwark of equanimity in the face of life’s difficulties. No philosophy could shield me from the news about Andrés—the man who made certain I never knew fatherlessness. He had developed cancerous nodes that posed a real danger to his life. The news struck like an asteroid—like the one that slew the mightiest creatures 66 million years ago, whose shockwaves still echo in stone. Here in the desert, I felt its ripples.

For weeks the nodes were examined and monitored, then surgically excised. He recovered fully. The tremors quelled, yet the episode left its mark: time was undefeated, and this was but a dress rehearsal.

At 18, I left home with ambitions to become an artist, leaving behind my mother, father, and 9-year-old sister. In the intervening years, I would see them once or twice a year. Now, 14 years and a cancer scare later, I needed to see them again. Days had accumulated into months, months into seasons, and yet here we were—the four of us reunited. It had been years since we had taken a trip together; traveling somewhere together had always been our way of cohabiting the landscape, as if to enact a physicality of togetherness regardless of the terrain. This time we had Kelsey to bolster our numbers. I found myself in their presence, overjoyed to see that the people I love had aged, however imperceptibly to the casual observer. My mother’s face was both familiar and novel. Andrés’ hands, which once pointed at cars, were more wrinkled but still firm. And my sister, ever youthful at 24, now carried herself with a maturity that hadn’t been there before.

Time moves, whether we attend to it or not.

Marcus Aurelius once advised to "accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart." These words echo in my mind as I find myself in an unexpected classroom for the practice of attention: the backseat of a family car, traveling through the Arizona desert. I was 33, but it seemed like I was 15 again, on a trip to Disney World in Florida to take my 6 year old sister to see Goofy and Donald Duck. It struck me then that while I had those moments at an early age, I didn’t realize how lucky I was. I was likely head down in my sketch book drawing anime characters or in a portable video game, still enjoying the banter of the car, but not exercising clear seeing. As those memories found my 33 year old self, I looked around, to clearly see was before me.

I took it in, then turned to write the following:

What would it feel like to be in the same place with the most important people in your life? Would you cherish those moments? Would you take stock and feel a sense of gratitude? I think many of us tell ourselves we would. We pay lip service to those ideals. And yet, we often find ourselves indulging in distraction, caught in loops of desire or preoccupation, failing to make true contact with the short time we have with those we claim to love. In some sense, I'm guilty of that even as I write this. I am in a car with the four most important people in my life. My father drives. My mother is filming the desert through the passenger-side window, narrating each cactus and rock formation like she's discovering them for the first time. My wife sits beside me, content to share this stretch of time, and my sister, seated behind me, is rotating through songs—playing DJ as we coast between destinations. It's a moment so full, and yet so fragile. In the not-too-distant future, this moment will be impossible. One of us will die. One of us will become infirm. Someone will move far away, or life will simply scatter us. I know that when that day comes, I would give anything to return to this: healthy, joking, singing, surrounded by the people who made me and those I love. What fascinates me is how obvious this seems—and yet how hard it is to truly surrender to it. To let it land. To feel, with my full attention, the miracle of what's already here. I tell myself that writing is another way to hold the moment. That putting it into words is my way of making contact. Of paying attention. Maybe I couldn't say all this aloud without killing the lightness of the car ride. Maybe it's better to say it here, quietly, and let them read it later.

As I write, my wife notices and leans over:

"What are you writing?" she grins. "Spill the tea!"

My sister laughs and chimes in: "Yeah, what is it?"

I smile and shake my head. "Don't worry about it.", I reply.

Because how could I tell them? That I'm writing about their eventual deaths—not to be morbid, but because thinking of it sharpens my gratitude. It's a way of meditating on how lucky I am to have them here. Laughing. Talking about music. Headed toward the red rocks of northern Arizona to watch the sky change color.

We pull over at a gas station. My wife wants sparkling water. I offer to get it.

And of course—I come back with the wrong kind.

Her laughter fills the car at my mistake as she playfully scolds me for getting the grapefruit flavor over the plain mineral water she would have preferred. Even if mathematics could restore ears to the long dead, how could equations ever come to restore this moment with its particular sounds? Not remarkable or significant in any objective sense, but real and ours. In this mundane moment—this altogether ordinary scene of a misunderstanding over carbonated water—I find myself fully present with those to whom fate has bound me, loving them with clarity and intensity as the ancient emperor advised.

This, perhaps, is the true fruit of all those years studying death and impermanence: a deepened capacity to notice life. Not as something to solve or reconstruct or preserve, but as something to witness while it remains. The practice of attending to what is rather than what was or what might be. I spent a year working on reconstructing the nasal tip, angle and protrusion relative to the skull based on statistically significant correlations, and yet, the smell of this car and the snacks these magnificent apes that surround me are grazing on, my sense of it, is mine alone to experience.; for it will vanish in the next moment, never to be resurrected by the tools of any future science.

The desert stretches before us; a landscape that has witnessed millions of years of life and death. Somewhere in those layers of rock are fossilized remains of gargantuan creatures who roamed these lands before our SUV—evidence of beings alien but similar to those I once tried to resurrect through clay and measurement. But today, I am not searching for meaning in the bones. I am simply here, attending to the living, breathing people beside me. The ones whose inner lives remain as mysterious and beautiful as any evolutionary puzzle, but who, unlike those distant relatives, can still meet my gaze, can still laugh at my mistakes, can still show me how to see.

There is nothing to solve. There is only this moment to witness before it becomes a fossil in my memory—a mere impression of what was once fully alive.