"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon"

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that so often we move through it half-asleep, postponing what matters until tomorrow, then tomorrow again. Mortality is an unavoidable boundary; the deeper sorrow is the wasted interior, days uninhabited, loves unspoken, talents unopened because fear, distraction, or habit kept us from beginning.

Many people fear the ending and scramble to outrun it with busyness. Yet busyness can be a sophisticated form of waiting: waiting for perfect conditions, for more money, for more confidence, for a sign. While we wait, time keeps a quiet tally. The hours fill with errands and scrolls, with respectable obligations that leave little room for wonder. What fades first is not the calendar but the capacity for astonishment, attention, and risk, the very qualities that make a life feel fully lived.

Life’s true measure isn’t its length but its density, how saturated each moment is with presence. An hour spent fully attentive to a friend, a craft, a forest path can outweigh a roaming year of autopilot. Attention is the currency of aliveness. Where it goes, life gathers: into relationships tended, into work done honestly, into the courage to speak truth and bear consequence, into quiet joys that require no audience.

The sentence is a summons to begin, not once but repeatedly. Begin the conversation you dread and the forgiveness you’ve rehearsed. Begin learning what you’ve told yourself you’re too old to try. Begin the poem, the garden, the walk around the block. Begin by noticing, steam curling from your cup, the way light changes a room, the particular music of someone you love.

Knowing the ending is certain can sharpen tenderness for what is here. It can turn urgency into gentleness, productivity into presence, ambition into meaning. The real tragedy is not that the page runs out, but that the ink stays in the pen. Begin, and begin again, while the page is still before you.