Life is Meant to be Shared

If a tree falls in the forest...

So I do something called bullet journaling. It's a pretty simple journalling practice that I find very helpful in organizing the myriad thoughts that occurr in my brain on a minute-by-minute basis. Without it, I'd find it much harder to juggle all the irons I've got in the fire, to mix a few idioms. Between wedding planning, work, writing, reading, training, painting minis, and learning Bengali, I've got a lot to keep track of. My bullet journal helps a lot with that (I'm going somewhere with this, I promise).

Another nice thing about a bullet journal is it's a lot more than just a to-do list. It also creates the space for me to just jot down thoughts that occur (an extremely useful tool for writers and the source of my next post as well as this one). This post comes from something I wrote down in the middle of an unplanned, last-minute flight to Houston for a family emergency. That thing I wrote down is the title of this post.

I truly, fundamentally believe that life is meant to be shared.

There's a lot in that statement. I don't necessarily think that sharing looks like marriage or a long-term romantic partnership for everyone, even if that's perhaps the most traditional route. I definitely don't think that looks like having an obssessive social media presence either, but it's the sharing of a thing that makes it special. The most gourmet dish falls flat when you're eating alone, and a story is only a story once it's been told. The telling of a thing, the passing of it from one person to another creates a new thing. It becomes something different, something more than it was.

I'll give another example, a story from my commute to work. I commute on the Trax and FrontRunner trains here in Salt Lake City (see my last post for a fun stab at a more journalistic style in these posts about delays on the TRAX and FrontRunner rail lines in SLC) and I typically have to leave quite early to get to the office on time. I had just gotten off at a station where I have to wait ~15 minutes to hit a connection and it was still dark out. There's a hospital near the train station, and behind it are the Wasatch mountains. I happened to glance back at the hospital, and what I saw was captivating.

But I was alone.

"The mountains of the Wasatch Front - all harsh edges and jagged lines - were dark. Silhouetted by the pale gray light of a tepid Autumn sunrise, they dwarfed the crisscross of power lines and the boxy, glowing hospital. High above, the slimmest of cresent moons alighted, the last sentinel of the vanishing night."

I wrote that text to my fiancee. I wanted to share what I saw, so I did my best to capture the image in words for her. She loved it (maybe you will too), but it still feels inadequate. Maybe it was my state of mind in the chill quiet of that early morning, but I desperately wished she could have seen it. It's a moment of quiet solitude that I'll always remember, and that has merit all its own, but I couldn't share it with the person I love the most.

And life is meant to be shared.