“Why do you treasure what you treasure?” a friend of mine had asked me when I told her that my goal in life was to savor my present.
I replied: “I treasure what I treasure because it is the closest I will ever be to forever.”
When I was younger, others have always told me to find something that will last forever and keep it close to me because it is priceless. But as I grew older, I began to come to a realization that nothing can last forever. The reason I think that is because when I was younger, my parents told me that ‘forever’ exists and that it’s something priceless. Although many has told me their belief on the concept of forever, and I do cannot I want to believe there is something that will last forever, life has given me no proof of its existence, but I will continue to search for that forever I keep hearing. Even if there’s nothing that lasts forever, I can still treasure what I have at this moment and try to make it last for as long as it can.
Money and status are practical objects, but it’s also very weak yet destructive. While in pursuit of material possession, people often lose sight of themselves and become someone that can be totally different from their original self. For example, Tiger Woods always appeared to be a good golfer, loving father, caring husband, and a model for others, but even he has changed. He began to think that with all his fame and fortune, he can have anything in the world. This resulted in him losing almost everything when the changed Tiger Woods was bought into the spotlight. When people keep denying that they have changed, more often than not, they have. But if people accept that they have changed and try to go back onto the right road or continue traveling on the right road, they still haven’t lost sight of yourself and they should treasure what they have at that moment.
When someone says, “tell me something that you would treasure forever,” what do you think of? Happiness? Friends? Family? Love? Time? For me, it would be all of those.
Friendship is something that can be as fragile as glass and at the same time, as strong as steel. Recently, I have lost a best friend of mine and I do miss her sometimes, but I knew sooner or later, this would happen because of our similarity. We were very alike and have almost identical interests, but that is what made our friendship shatter like a mirror. Even if we try gluing the pieces together again in the future, there would always be the cracks and we would need a lot of time. Even though we are not friends anymore, I know the memory and happiness that we shared would stay with me even if the friendship doesn’t exist.
Love is a feeling that is fleeting. It is a necessity, and at times it is as warm as the sun, and at other times, it is as sour as a lime. When I see someone I love, even if I had a terrible day, all my feelings lighten and I can wear a smile on my face. I believe that love is like a warm breeze that can appear and disappear at a moment’s notice, coming from a desolate nowhere and receding at low tide. It is simply magic and as you would savor a warm breeze in your face, you should learn to savor love in your memories because even when the love is all gone, you can never replace it.
When I was little, I would hear these stories and lessons about how important and valuable family is and I would always start thinking about my family. My family is something that I believed in being with forever. My mind changed when about two years ago, my dad told me that I need to start taking of myself more because he’s getting old and death might catch up to him any time. I could feel the tears welling up in my eye and I just wanted to let the tears out, but I knew I needed to be strong, so I nodded and told him that I would. I will never be able to imagine life without my family because I love them with all my heart. No matter how hard life gets, I know my family will be behind me – encouraging me to keep going forward and smile for as long they can, so I will always be treasuring my time with them.
People often forget the reality and themselves after they reach what they believe as their highest point in life, they begin to think that this is their ‘forever’, but during this pursuit, they have probably lost many things that last even longer than their ‘forever’. Even I have lost many things while in pursuit of other things and I made mistakes that have carved itself onto my memory. But because of that, I learned to treasure the happiness and the time that had passed. Forever is just a figurative language, an exaggeration; there isn’t a single thing that can last forever, but we can still treasure what we have at this moment! Even when we lose it in life, it’s not gone entirely, it’s still in our heart and memory for as long as we remember it.
