Just Passing By

My fish died. I did not know him very well or for very long and cannot identify any idiosyncratic characteristics about him. He lived in a small glass vase with some plants and he was a Beta that we named Theo. He died a week after we got him. I thought that flushing him and moving on seemed too normal or insensitive or something and that his death especially because he was just a fish and because I barely knew him, was symbolic. I don't know why, but his passing seemed so revolutionary. So I drew him and themed his existence in my life "...Just Passing By" because that seems a lot like what life and our periodic confrontations with death, relationships, experiences, etc. are like.

How is it that we can have all of these different relationships in our lives, some of them short, some of them long, some of them lasting only a day or shorter,  but that their length often seems inconsequential to their impact on us. I might have interpreted Theo's existence in my life as completely inconsequential, as just another insignificant experience that came and went. But, if it is true that particulars have the power to point to universals, then Theo's coming and going may be the archetypal example of the fleetingness of life, of our short-lived existence on this planet. So what are we going to do with it? I could have let Theo go without a second thought and my life would have probably moved on at a steady pace, but if we keep letting little things pass by like this, if the fleeting relationships or seemingly meaningless people/animals/things who we encounter are all interpreted as meaningless than life becomes meaningless and only the big people with the grand ideas, who do "important things" become the only ones who matter. Not that they don't matter. It is just that they often cause us to create hierarchies of people/ideas/systems and then value some over others... like valuing people who are smarter than others over people who have a greater capacity to love selflessly over others or valuing someone who is more well-spoken or well-endowed or more fill-in-the-blank than someone else when, in reality, we all factor into someone's construction of more-than and less-than. 

Creativity and imagination are the forces that drive life forward in a meaningful way. They will allow us to imagine a life that is not prescribed to us by external forces like the culture industry or capitalism or mass society, a life that is filled with a love that is not comprised of mere romantic notions of how it should be lived. So thank you Theo, for coming into my life and allowing me to be immortalize your passing in a creative way that brings intentional, deliberate, positive meaning to my life. Now I can look at this picture and see life as fresh and new and exciting and **potentially** meaningful.