Sublime in Finitude and Why I Write
Riding in the backseat of my friend’s Jeep one night, I watched him shift his attention between the glowing phone in his hand and the dark windy road ahead. In that moment, the hum of the engine and the flicker of passing streetlights pressed a sudden truth on me: any breath could be my last. It wasn’t until then I realized how fragile life truly is, and how easily the illusion of endless continuation, our normalcy bias, can shatter. That realization would later propel me to search for a way to resist and cheat oblivion. Through writing, I have learned to slow down, appreciate the finite beauty of life, and leave behind a legacy that endures beyond death.
Death is inevitable. No matter one’s wealth, status, or contribution to the world, life has an expiration date. While this thought can be terrifying, I found it could also be freeing, and my view on death progressed from blood curdling to a profound appreciativeness. If I could not outlast death physically, how could I preserve something of myself through creation. My first attempt at that preservation was journaling. What began as scribbled notes about my day became a habit of capturing fleeting ideas and emotions before they disappeared. Each page to me symbolized a pause from the constant momentum of life, teaching me to notice details I otherwise would have overlooked. In the documentation of my raw, unfiltered thoughts, I found a way to reclaim time from its relentless forward motion.
However, a major turning point came after I watched Dead Poet’s Society. Robin William’s character urged his students, “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your life extraordinary.” Stirred up by this glorious film, the next morning I ran to Barnes & Noble and picked up Mary Oliver’s Devotions. As I read through her poems on my porch at home, I was struck by the quiet and passive urgency in her words. In “The Summer Day”, she asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”. That line resonated with me, it made me pause and look around, noticing the leaves dancing in the wind and the beautiful purple hue of the sunset. Oliver’s poetry wasn’t just a description of life, but it was an implicit teaching on how to see the small components that make up its beauty.
Inspired, I began to write poems of my own. At first, I kept them private, worried that sharing them would invite judgement that might distort their authenticity. But in the act of writing them, mostly late at night before bed, I began to notice how my perception changed. Routine walks felt fuller, small conversations helped more weight, the mundane meant more to me, and the world seemed vibrant through this newfound lens of mortality. Poetry became my way of practicing what I believed, which was slowing down, savoring what was fleeting, and making meaning out of the finite.
Writing's uniqueness stems from its timelessness. Unlike photographs or videos, which hand images directly to the viewer, words leave space for interpretation. Different interpretations of the text can spark debate, talks, and connections over the material, extending the longevity of the writer’s ideas. Writing invites readers into conversation, even long after the writer is gone. That dialogue is itself a form of legacy. I realized that through writing, I was not only preserving my own experiences but was also participating in a much older human effort to leave traces behind for others to discover.
Let's imagine a world where humans are immortal, where there is no end to this life and the normalcy bias of continuation we have will hold up no matter what. If that was the case, the joys and sublime moments of life would often go unappreciated. If humans lived forever, would a sunrise mean anything when there were infinite more to come? It would come and go through a person’s mind because they will experience it for all eternity. Sharing a moment of laughter with friends, a meal with family, dreams with a significant other, would be deemed as insignificant. The reason why these moments do have the importance they do in the real world is because those moments are finite.
Today, with technology constantly pulling people into endless streams of content, almost in a trance-like state, it is easy to miss them. Writing, however, forces solitude. It combats the blurs of consumption and allows one to breath and reflect, and grab hold onto the fleeting. Right now, writing is more important than ever, a simple act of creation, a pause from the hustle and bustle of the outside world.
It is vital that we stray from this normalcy bias regarding the continuation of life. Through the craft of writing, I’ve found its benefits include lasting legacy, easing off of life’s fast pace, and a breath of fresh air from the constant consumption the current world has normalized. From the Jeep ride where mortality first startled me, to the bookstore where Mary Oliver’s poetry changed my vision, to the quiet nights spent writing poems, my own literacy journey has been about confronting death through creation. Writing slows the rush of life and transforms the finite into something lasting. Existence’s limited sublime moments hold value because they can only be experienced once, in this brief interlude between two nothings we call life.