Thought Vignettes

Similar to when you learn a new word and suddenly feel like you hear it everywhere, I notice mentions of and topics relating to death all the time now. I'm hyper-aware of references to death or dying anywhere all the time, and they just keep popping up. For example, earlier today I was annoyed because I was stuck behind a big truck on a narrow one-way road for a long time, and then I read the back of it and realized it was for a hospice.

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I want to feel like I've been living more presently, worrying less, and seeing more silver linings in situations, and I started writing something to the effect that I was, and then I realized that it was completely false and it was only in retrospect that I was feeling better about all the things I was using as examples, and that in the moment I'd rated/complained/panicked about them as much as ever.

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People don't normally talk about death because no one ever brings it up. But with all the time I've been spending writing/thinking/talking about it, it's become a natural thing for me to want to bring up in conversation with people I'm close to, and I've had a number of fulfilling death/mortality-related conversations just because I was willing to raise the subject.

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I keep being in circumstances, particularly when reading Cross Pollination applications and meeting the selected artists, where I feel incredibly humbled and reminded of how young I am and how much life I have ahead of me. There's a nagging fear that I'll never be nearly that awesome myself, but much more overpowering is the sense of how fortunate I am to get to be around such incredible people in all different artistic fields. I feel a little bit like I'm orbiting a bunch of bright suns and hoping that I'll soak up a little of all their different kinds of light and converge it all to figure out what I want/need to create myself. We talked about fear of not accomplishing something or mattering, and I wish I could impart to the artists I'm interacting with how wowed I am by them and the lives they've carved out for themselves, and how much they matter to me, how inspiring it is for the next generation of "emerging artists."

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I'm a lot more afraid of getting old than I am of dying. I feel like if I constantly live a good and fulfilling life, I could die whenever and it wouldn't bother me all that much. Much greater is my concern that I'll be fortunate enough to stay in the arts world and continue to be fulfilled by that, but not have the financial ability to develop a proper retirement plan, and that I'll suddenly reach old age and realize I have literally nothing to live on. The idea of living in the present backfiring later is absolutely terrifying. I try not to think about it because I don't want to be ruled by fear or make career choices that are governed by that, but at the same time it is a genuine concern that I can't ignore forever.