“This too shall pass.” I heard that early in my life, and every time I encountered it, it was always in the context of weathering a storm. This bad thing that is happening now: this will not be happening forever. There is a rosier, kinder tomorrow that this phrase invites us to believe is on its way. Bad days will end. You can survive this. Stay alive for that day, which will come.
It was a revelation when of all possible philosophical muses, Lauren Conrad, whom I followed for unknown reasons, posted something several years ago on Instagram, and the caption absolutely blew my mind. She flipped this phrase I’d heard for years entirely on its head. “This too will pass.”
What she meant was different. She was inviting us to cherish today, this good day, this sweet day, this day that isn’t perfect but which contains some beauty. That these imperfect, beautiful little moments: these will end. That today is only today, and this moment—however beautiful or terrible—this, too, will pass. And that’s it. Then it’s whatever happens next. But it’s not this, here, now.
iPhone does some crazy shit to us with the “Featured Photos” they curate daily, unprovoked. Click here! I always do. This one today smacked me in the face with that realization, again, à la Lauren Conrad on Instagram: this moment was beautiful, and imperfect, and it ended. It is now almost seven years ago that I saw this particular September sky. I was living on Glyndon Avenue in a bungalow, renting a bright, lovely, patio-adjacent room from an insane woman named Jennie. The name alone still makes me shudder.
And I was in the waning days of a truly ridiculous relationship with a divorced man I’d met at work. He was ten years my senior, and he had a five-year-old child, and he lived twenty miles up the 405, and he was in the middle of a mind-boggling legal battle with his vicious and criminal ex-wife. This woman had embezzled a hundred thousand dollars from her Holocaust-survivor grandmother. And more from my boyfriend. You can’t make this shit up.
It did feel insane in that moment. It had also rained the night before, which is a rare and splendid occurrence in Southern California. I drank it in. I took this picture when I walked outside the next morning: those clouds were exquisite. That pattern, that color, that freshly renewed sky. I can breathe that air when I see this picture today, seven years later.
And I’m glad I stopped to take that picture that morning. I’m glad that in the midst of all that turmoil, I was still able to witness that sky, to look up, to decide, somewhere in my consciousness, that even this would pass. And to record that instant of beauty, at the moment I noticed it. That moment did pass. That moment was imperfect. That moment was beautiful.
This moment tonight, Sunday, May 15, 2022, 8:45pm Pacific Daylight Time, Santa Monica, California: this moment is imperfect. This moment is beautiful. This too will pass.
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