The Weight of Old Stones

I spent this morning trying to fix a loose floorboard in the hallway. It’s a small, annoying thing that has been creaking for months, a tiny protest every time I walk to the kitchen. As I knelt there, I realized how much of our lives is spent patching up the surfaces of things, trying to keep the structure of our days from shifting too much. We build our little worlds, we paint the walls, we tighten the screws, and we act as if these things will hold us forever. But then I looked at the dust settling in the corner, and I thought about how everything eventually returns to the earth. We are just temporary tenants in our own lives, aren’t we? We leave our marks, we build our monuments, and then we move on, leaving the walls to hold the silence we once filled. Does it matter that we won’t be here to see the end of what we started?

Pavel Yudin has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled Surrounding Eternity. It serves as a quiet reminder of how much history lives in the things we leave behind. What does the passage of time look like in your own home?