When the year comes to an end, a lumbering sadness overcomes me. It is checking a checkbox, knowing it was not all done. I haven’t done everything I wanted to. I haven’t lived or laughed or kissed enough. I have wasted time, arguing with people, being angry at them. I have wasted time being scared. And then I sat at dinner, staring at the thick fog expanding over my house, leaving nothing but a grey, dizzy canvas, and suddenly the last bite of the pizza was gone and it felt like the saddest thing in the world.
Then I found this essay and everything changed.
It’s about time and how everyone should live at their own pace. It’s about hummingbirds and blue whales, about losing love and winning truth. It’s about the swirling and whirling and churning of life.
But read for yourself: Bryan Doyle: Joyas Volardores, Flying Jewels.
This is how it starts:
«Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas volardores, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.»
Hattip to Malte Welding, who wrote about Joyas Volardores in his brilliant column about love.