Life is cumulative...
There are patterns that govern our lives. Postulates that outline what we think to be true. Methodologies. Beliefs. Strategies. Assumptions. Master narratives and grounding principles. Our own personal unified theory of being in the world.
And then, there are moments when we discover that all of our itemized presumptions don't mean shit.
We come into contact with an eschaton. An apocalypse. Revelation and disruption at once. A moment that redefines what everything means. “A moment that changes [all] the moments that follow,” Erin Morgenstern says. One that revises and reshapes. Starts and concludes. One that marks the end of everything you thought you knew, and the beginning of a whole new way to be you.
A mixed tape becomes a messenger. Four chords drenched in angst and distortion, exorcising the smell of your teenage spirit.
A book becomes a friend and knows you better than you know yourself.
After nine months of anxious waiting, you listen to new lungs take their first inhalation and release a cry so deep, so gutteral, so unmistakably beautiful that it shakes the earth beneath your feet, and changes the tilt of the world.
When a sentence sent from one stranger to another across a gulf of ocean and time alters the trajectory of both their lives and redesigns everything they thought love could be.
A different world comes into view for an instant, hidden within the bits of this one. Pieces and particles below the surface tension of solidity and immutability. A network of whispering secrets reaching out to all the unspoken things.
And you start to think, that maybe, just maybe, if you could collect enough of them, you could be different too.
Maybe you could start to believe.
That small moments build into bigger adventures. That magic, is something real. That the greatest of all the world's alchemies is the discovery that a life is something cumulative.