Nothing Gold Can Stay

It was shiny and new. I wanted it so bad when I saw it perfectly placed on its perch in the store. It was shiny and new. I was at the store for something I knew I needed yet the thing I didn’t know I needed sent to me its siren’s song. “Come, look at me! I am shiny and new!” The debate raged between Gollum and Sméagol in my head for the precious. You have the money and you deserve it because you have worked so hard. You have the money but you have better things to spend it on, you need to save more in this economy. Yea, but it really isn’t that much money. It is more money than I should be spending right now. Yea, but it is shiny and new! I know but, well, it is shiny and new. I bought it.

I don’t know where it is now. If you asked I could probably find it but it isn’t shiny and new. This is a perennial problem in people with many parables to prop our difficult decisions, but we continue to pander to the pretty. It is shiny and new! Whether it is a Matchbox car or the latest Muscle car, the perfect shoe or the right amount of Carats; we opt for the shiny and new.

Shiny and new is neither in the harsh light of the next morning.

Robert Frost captures this in his poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Adam and Eve’s shiny and new was a forbidden fruit; what’s yours? Remember what it looks like in the naked light of morning because nothing gold can stay.