now or never

reflections at the summer solstice

It was still dark when I left the house — the world, Sunday-morning quiet — the kind of quiet that feels like a held breath — as I drove in the pre-dawn light toward Old Town Alexandria.

I parked and walked to the waterfront in the early morning rain, not yet fully awake, but feeling the pull to be there. As I turned the corner, I saw the large illuminated art installation standing at the edge of the water, two steel arches, lights mounted overhead, framing two billboards — one reading NOW, and the other NEVER, confronting each other across a path slicked with rain.

I'd seen the installation, called Now or Never by Alicia Eggert, earlier this week when I showed a visiting friend around Old Town. The size and simplicity of the piece were powerful — but it was the phrase itself — now or never — that I'd been turning over in my mind all week. There was an urgency to it — like a threat, almost. Do it now or you never will.

I was still thinking about it when, at 10:30 last night, I happened to see a picture of the installation on my social media feed with a short article about a summer solstice gathering at 5:30 this morning to view the installation with the sun rising in the center of the two billboards, along the narrow walkway, as the artist had designed it.

The summer solstice is a strange, beautiful hinge — a midpoint where light stops expanding and starts to recede, even while summer is just beginning. Ancient cultures honored this threshold by building monuments aligned to catch the light and angle of this once-a-year convergence of sky and stone, much like Eggert did in her piece. They understood that everything moves in cycles and nothing lasts forever. That the longest day and fullest light in the western hemisphere, when the calendar pauses at its peak before beginning its slow turn back toward shorter, darker days, demands our full presence, or it'll pass us by entirely.

It was a reminder I needed.

I feel like I've spent a lot of this year waiting to get there. That undefined place that always feels just out of reach. Waiting for the next launch, the next love, the next deadline, the next chapter. Waiting for the right version of myself to arrive before I feel like I can begin living my life fully — proof that I've made it. As if living is something that happens after things settle down. After we finish the project. After weI publish the book. After we make a certain amount of money. After we find "success" defined by metrics that aren't ours and as a result can't ever seem to meet. After the world stops being so relentlessly, exhaustingly hard.

But standing at the waterfront on the summer solstice — watching the light begin to bleed along the edges of the horizon, the sky shifting from deep violet to something I can only describe as alive — I felt something begin to loosen in my chest, a voice from deep within reminding me of what I've been forgetting lately.

I'm already here.

Not almost here. Not on my way here. Here.

Now.

It made me think about the world we're living in — rooted in capitalism, competition and dehumanization, where slowing down feels like lost opportunity and stokes a fear of missing out. But we are missing out. Life is happening now, while we're caught up in memories of the past or worry about a future that hasn't happened yet.

I had the opportunity to speak with the artist after the sun came up and the small crowd of people left. She shared that she has aphantasia — the inability to form mental images. She can't close her eyes and picture a face, a place, a memory. So her art has always centered on words, on language, on the things we can name and speak and hold in our mouths instead of in our mind's eye. What struck me the most about this was that because her mind doesn't work in pictures, she can't really reminisce the way most of us do — in images playing like an internal home movie. So she's always, almost by necessity, present to the moment, which is so different from how many of us move through the world.

I know this. I wrote a whole book about it. And yet, I still struggle through it like everyone else.

Half the year has unfolded already. Half remains. And in this glowing, liminal morning I found myself asking: what is my now or never? What have I been putting off until some imaginary future version of my life begins? What is already here, waiting for me to notice it?

What I noticed was everything I got by being present. I got to gather with a handful of strangers who also chose to show up in the dark. I got to experience Old Town before the tourists, before the noise, before the day claimed it. I got to slow down and experience the raw, unfiltered beauty of nature. I got to meet the artist and other fellow artists and be reminded that I live in a place filled with creativity. I got to watch the sun peek above the horizon — just for a moment, before it disappeared under cloud cover — and know that this exact combination of light and mist and people and sky would never, ever happen again.

The world is genuinely rough right now — I'm not interested in pretending otherwise. But I'm learning — slowly, imperfectly, one misty sunrise at a time — that roughness and beauty can occupy the same space, and that the best parts of my life aren't on the other side of that roughness — they're inside it, now. Presence isn't something we achieve after we arrive somewhere — it's something we practice from exactly where we are — now.

What is already here, waiting for you to notice it?