The Sudden Death of David Bowie, and the Brilliance and Beauty We Miss Every Day

Brilliance and Beauty are seductive things.

At first they come to us and they level us with such ferocity and intensity, their newness widely flooding our unprepared hearts. We notice them, we cherish them, we celebrate them—we allow them to overwhelm us.

This is what love looks like.

But over time we grow so used to Brilliance and Beauty’s glorious presence in our lives that we gradually become numb to the gifts they give; our ears slowly deafened until their songs are relegated to merely a background noise that we hardly notice any longer.

We live in our ordinary days believing they are permanent; that what we have we will always have and who we are with we will always have with us, and in this way we overlook just how miraculous and fragile and fleeting those ordinary days really are.

We seem only ever able to truly embrace our treasures once they are just beyond our grasp. We fail to…