My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.

Isnt it pointless to try and control situations and people inspite of us knowing that all of this will end one day. Life is as strange as death. We cannot let go of our hold on life no matter what. Even when we feel hopeless, we have the instrinsic and subconscious hope that there might still be something in our hold and hopelessness is probably the result of the subconscious version of having the final hold on life.

Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it. If he was told to draw, it was like waking from a dream and trying to dream it again. A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.

The artist was fourteen years old and knew nothing about art, but one day he would be grown-up and celebrated around the world, and would realize that he still only knew the same simple things: Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.

“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,” the artist had said, and there had been no fear in his voice, no bitterness. It had been a long life. Wild and precious.