My beautifully machined pen is showing signs of the half-dozen times I've dropped it on the tile floors of Casa Yaya. "Nothing lasts. All things change." But it's nice to think that you can slow down the process. Likely a general sense of contentment with occasional moments of outright happiness must be tempered once in awhile by the unanticipated brief realization that indeed progress towards the inevitable has occurred. For me, these are moments of profound melancholy, a mercifully fleeting sadness about the brevity of this wonderful prolonged experience called life.
Keeping things vital is the great task we can set ourselves. Not in some formulaic way. This can never work, because there are infinite ways to live a life. The idea is to invest whatever we do with life, like a reverse siege (though military people have always spoken of "investing" a town or city by means of taking it, if possible, passively).
There can be no how-tos, although we can try to tell one another how to expedite or in some way ultimately ease the discomfort or inconvenience that encounters with the real world can sometimes impose. Shortening waits in international airports and elsewhere.
There can be an effort made to share what can be an infinitely expansive way of engaging with life and injecting life into whatever circumstance provides. This is what we should do. For some of us, this is what we must do. When what there is to be spread around is in itself an infinitely self-generating commodity — finding as much satisfaction in a task as you are capable of — then generosity is a light burden, if it is a burden at all. If God meant for us not to commune, not to share, he would have made as many caves of minimally habitable space as there are souls on the planet. We all must eat—why not eat well? And the effort of preparation is as much for one as it is for six.
Though, in fact, one must begin with our selves making the effort of finding the life in things, or putting life into them.