The common mayfly has a life expectancy of just one day.
But is his miserable about it?
Not one bit.
He fills his day with the things he loves.
He soars. He swoops. He savours every moment.
Maybe there's a lesson in this for us longer living creatures?
Just think- if we embraced life like the mayfly-
What a life that would be.



There will be miserable nights when your body gets hijacked by your head. It misses that point where sleep is still a possibility and forges on to pass the night insomnia-struck. But then there will also be sleepless nights when sleep doesn’t come simply because you will it away. You will want to watch nostalgic movies that make you cry and dab your eyes with the corner of soft blankets. You will want to sit and listen to old recordings of friends strumming familiar songs in familiar tones. You will mouth along, striking each cadence perfectly, reaching with pointed brows at all the right instrumental breaks because somehow that’s what your friendships have become: perfectly orchestrated concerts of give and take, warm comfort, understanding. And it’s easy, these memories. You slip right into them as if no time has passed. But years have. Seasons changed, the years recycled back into summers. The differences between then and now are glaring, almost depressing if you think too hard. But lovely at the same time. You remember meetings held huddled around an uneven table at the back of some musty cafe. Hours passed there, sipping tea and laughing.

You ended each meeting with Space Oddity and that was right. It’s one of those songs that will catapult you back to thick summer nights—to college and other wrinkle-free moments—when you’re older, grayer, more comfortable with time passing though somehow desperate to turn back the clock, flip back through scrapbook pages or journal files until you reach this moment. When spring breathed into summer and you still knew the same people only better, with more stories to back up each familiar silhouette, with more conversations under your belt of a friendship, more nights spent apart. And there will always be the occasional phone call or email. The Christmas cards with smiling snapshots of growing families and receding hairlines. Like a time-lapse photo, you’ll shuffle through the years watching Jonas and Miriram and other Biblically-named children grow out of infancy and into awkward teens. Until they’re just like eveyone you used to know. A few generations younger, sporting different clothes but with the same summery feeling sewn into their seams.

There will always be those handful of songs that will put you back in a car racing towards the city or curving through the canyons or lying on your back on your living room floor. You’ll always love handclaps in songs, you’ll always love Dave Eggers and Don Delillo and Foer and Krauss. Perhaps your admiration will fade, your tastes will change, but you will always attribute these years to them. How they helped shape thoughts and essays and poems, conversations.

You’ll always love bear cubs, any sort of small cute animal that brings back old friends and their emails. You’ll always love bike rides, sunsets, Creamies, My So Called Life, small pieces of fabric or painted paper framed, cut off shorts and cheap slides. You’ll always love falling asleep to a whispering fan, baking late at night, picnicking, wandering towns until you know them like your young daughter, parks and BBQs, the sound of a swamp cooler, the look of magenta stripes against black, the spectacular holiness of mountains and canyons that grow old and young in the course of a year, the mournful sound of elegiac piano, ripped jeans and flannel, bonfires at the lake, the amphitheatre, stargazing, porch-sitting, constitutionals, that old book store, the fluff of cherry trees in bloom, the feel of mild rain, chalk pictures, phone calls that result in impromptu parties, swings, bubbles, frozen yogurt, homemade anything, remembering that there was a time in your life when seven square blocks became an entire world, that there was a time in your life when your best friends lived ten minutes away or less, that they were always there whenever you need them, or just whenever, the thought that people cared and loved you for being strange and immature and in love with life, the thought that everything was new and waiting to be discovered, the thought of being young and excited and scared about life, the thought that some place foreign became a home, the thought that once-strange people became a family.

And sometime 20 years in the future you'll sift through the old memories when you're packing up your much fuller library and remember those times you curled up with someone with heads resting in elbow crooks and a television screen flickering blue across your faces. You'll remember how the room was generally set to shadows, a vague hum of traffic outdoors, the soft rustle of a beanbag shifting beneath you. And the talking. The conversation. His hand on your cheek felt safer than safe. And you'll remember the awkward and you'll remember the wonderful. How there was ice cream, touching knees, and the small possibility and thus the small hope for an us. Your empty shelves and boxed books will seem so compact, so simple in the face of this avalanche of memories. You'll laugh at the Proust-ishness of it all. And hope that somewhere someone 20 years from now is sitting in a sunny kitchen with a newspaper folded on his knee, enjoying a moment of peace before his family wakes up, and thinking about those nights. You'll smile at this thought because the him you imagine 20 years from now sits at his kitchen table and, well. Of course. He smiles too.