The Best Day of Our Life

Painting by Sergi Cadenas

Today I saw a fascinating 19-second video of a dual-image portrait by Sergi Cadenas (you can view it at this link: https://twitter.com/i/status/1585263283602325504). At first the painting appears to be the face of a young girl, about 14 or 15 years old; her skin is smooth, her lips plump, her eyes innocent. However, as you change your vantage point, the painting changes in appearance; the face is lined with wrinkles, the lips have thinned, the eyes are rheumy. Suddenly you are looking at the face of an old woman! Cadenas achieves this effect by painting an image on each side of vertical strips, which allows him to include two completely different images in one piece. 

Watching a person age before your eyes within 19 seconds is a graphic representation of St. Benedict’s advice to “keep death daily before you.” For most of our lives, death seems far off, when actually we carry it within us; every minute, 300 million cells die in our body. Ironically, the death of these cells make life possible as new cells are formed to take the place of the ones that are worn out.

One thing I noticed about the Cadenas painting is that the images of both the young girl and the old woman are beautiful — the promise of youth and the wisdom of old age. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year,” but we can expand that notion. In one way or another, every day is the best day not just in the year but in our lives, full of wondrous things that will never be again.

Keeping death daily before us can help us live each day as if it is the best day of our life. Then, when the time comes to take our final breath, we can place a lifetime of well-lived days into God’s hands in gratitude for loving us into being.