The Inner Margins is a series of brief reflections on random subjects. I am sometimes more in the mood of sharing compressed thoughts rather than long essays.
The title comes from the inner margins of a book: the white space near the spine, where readers leave their notes. Those spaces seem secondary, but they often hold your learnings.
The salt of life does not hide in the grand narrative, but at its edges, in the empty spaces where understanding is incomplete. What I share here belongs to that space: passing thoughts that may turn out to matter more than they first appear.
As one grows older, some new emotions kick in. We become more mature and some of our flaws sharpen. Some fears reappear, some others disappear.
Maturity is not always a blessing, even though it can be beneficial to be relatively immature about certain things, especially concerning creation. There is some beautiful naïveté and ingenuity about the way we approach life when we are younger. Unfortunately, for some people, that feeling of innocence ends abruptly. For others, it never disappears. I believe we must never let that feeling fade away completely.
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As we grow older, an ineffable feeling appears. One of them is the awareness of last times. The last time you see someone, the last time you feel something, the last time you visit some place, the last time a given opportunity presents itself.
I do not think we grow more conscious about last times because they happen more. I mean, consider the last time we were at school, the last time we were at University, or the last time we saw some long-lost friends. Those are all things that happened when we were quite young, even a kid. But at that time, one is not really aware. I believe that, when older, one is more conscious (or maybe not1) about the last times, and there are more last times every time.
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Thinking about this, I realized that English language, and many others such as French, Spanish, or Arabic, do not really offer a word for the last occurrence of something.
Not even Greek, whose vocabulary of time is richer than most, gives us exactly what we need. It has kairos, the right or critical moment (and, with entropy, one of my favorite concepts2), and telos, the end, purpose, or completion, but neither names the unnoticed final instance of a thing. Arabic perhaps comes closer with zawal, which evokes decline, the moment the sun begins to descend, and by extension something slowly, irreversibly fading away.
The closest word I found may be in Tamazight, the family of Berber languages of Northern Africa: aneggaru, the last in a sequence, the final thing, the last time something happens3.
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Some last times are voluntary, like when you quit a job or cut someone out of your life. For others, we have less control, such as when a place we love closes, or, of course, when a loved one dies. Sometimes, even when we act with agency, it’s difficult to grasp the significance of the last moment.
I often find myself thinking about the last time I saw someone and wondering if I will ever see them again. In some cases, I feel sad. Most of the time, I feel slightly uncomfortable—perhaps because, as we grow older, time gains more weight with every second, and each final occurrence carries greater significance. In some other cases, I feel more — even though not completely — at peace, because this person brought nothing to my short existence. Or because destiny was made this way, that our paths will never cross each other again.
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In all cases, last times expose the transient nature of human life. We appear briefly, share fragments of time with others, and then vanish. It is not enough to live with the knowledge of our own imminent death. One must understand that each moment is both the first and the last time life will ever occur in this form.
This awareness should influence our behaviours, and lead us to practice various things. The obvious one is kindness, because a single act of meanness may become the final version of how someone experienced you4. Genuineness, because no moment repeats, and to live it under terms that are not yours is to waste it entirely. Courage, because the last chance to act often passes unnoticed, and regret fixes itself precisely where action did not. Gratitude, because every moment is complete in itself, and only our failure to recognize it turns it into regrets once it is gone.
The awareness of last times, and the need for gratitude, should guide ungrateful people: those who destroy what they already have in pursuit of hypothetical things they do not, only to destroy those too once they finally get them. That being said, ungratefulness toward life can take various forms.
For example, it also applies to people who place negative emotion above reality in every experience. If anxiety appears in the middle of a good opportunity, they surrender the whole experience to anxiety. If insecurity rises in the face of love or intimacy, they crush and annihilate the opportunity to live it5. If growth requires stress, they choose stagnation instead. Then, in all those cases, they commit one final and perhaps most unpardonable form of ingratitude: they refuse to learn the lesson life offered them through the very chance to fail and instead choose to blame someone else, the world, or any culprit they can find. Ungratefulness first, ungratefulness then.
At bottom, this is ingratitude: toward fate, toward life, toward destiny, and toward the finite nature of what is given to us here, now, and perhaps for the last time.
We all run out of time sooner than we expect. Act accordingly.
Self-absorbed people have trouble with it. Too focused on themselves to truly see.
I have the intuition they are closely related, I just don’t know how yet, but I have a lifetime to think about it. Kairos needs entropy, entropy leads to kairos.
Just a coincidence and unrelated to the fact I’m a Berber myself.
Even though a mean person probably acted similarly before, and deserve their last times. Through voluntary last times we express our agency.
Either by fleeing and acting cowardly, or by destroying the one offering them love and intimacy. In the worst cases, they do both. They start by destroying, then they disappear like cowards.