Why We Save Anything at All
Pickles, purpose and a special person gone too soon
I’d like you to consider, for a long moment, the wonder of pickles.
Yes, pickles — those humble green logs of salt and patience — which, if you listen closely, are really small sermons about time and hope and the stubborn human desire to hold on to things that do not wish to be held.
Because here is the miracle: 4,000 years ago, long before most nations were nations or most gods were gods, someone in the Tigris Valley stood over a clay jar and said, essentially, No. Not yet. You don’t get to go bad yet.
And thus began the holy art of holding on.
Milk into yogurt, cabbage into kimchi, tea into kombucha, grains into sourdough, cucumbers into pickles, rot into sustenance, fleeting into lasting. Fermental alchemy, domestic wizardry, the oldest magic trick in the book besides fire. The world ending every day and someone, somewhere, saying not today, not this one, this one we will save.
And isn’t that us? Isn’t that what we do with money and memories and love — pickle them as best we can, preserve them against the onslaught of hours and seasons and the blunt fact of our own impermanence?
We try so hard. We try with vinegar and jars and 401(k)s and photo albums and whispered prayers and stubborn hope.
We try because we know, from the moment we know anything, that nothing stays. Everything changes. Everything dissolves. Everything goes.
And yet.
Yet we keep preserving.
Yet we keep salting and saving.
Yet we keep putting aside a few dollars from a thin paycheck, writing down the stories before they slip away, calling the people we love even when the call is short, taking pictures of our children though they wiggle out of the frame, whispering I love you even if we’re late for work.
Barbara Kingsolver once wrote:
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
Because this is what we do.
Because this is what we must do.
Because the “long defeat” — carrying on despite knowing complete victory is unlikely — as the doctor Paul Farmer called it, is still worth fighting.
Preserving the unpreservable
I’d like you to consider the wonder of pickles because I am not, in the end, writing about pickles.
I am writing about mortality — the direction life flows whether we approve or not, the thing that shapes our relationship with money and memory and affection and the whole trembling business of being human.
Everything goes away. Empires fall into dust. Masterpieces crack and fade. That one condiment in your fridge you used only once — yes, that too is going bad.
You can throw all the salt you want on something, but eventually the universe wins. Try to cup water in your palm. Try to hold a sunset. Try to keep a child small. Life is slippery.
The brutal miracle is that humans are the only creatures who know, from the beginning, that our days are numbered. We know our resources are limited, our time unrenewable, our bodies temporary vessels. That kind of knowledge should break us.
And yet we keep going. We keep fighting the messy situation Shakespeare called “a pickle.”
We act in hope because what else is there?
Hippocrates said it in Latin:
Ars longa, vita brevis.
Art is long, life is short.
That is not a resignation, but a summons. Make something that lasts, because you won’t.
Today that urge to preserve collides with a culture built on disposability — planned obsolescence, infinite content, the churn of consumption. New feeds, new trends, new distractions. Everything disposable. Everything forgettable. Everything impermanent.
In such a world, no wonder people are more anxious and hope feels threadbare. No wonder people ask, quietly or out loud: Why save? Why plan? Why imagine a future?
Purpose.
Research shows people with a strong sense of purpose accumulate more wealth, handle it more wisely and grow it more steadily. Hope compounds. Meaning compounds. Purpose is preservation’s twin.
It’s quaint but telling that people once kept physical jars — pickle jars — labeled for their goals. Rent. Christmas. Car repair. College. Dreams. This works not because the jars are magical, but because humans long for purpose and long to preserve things.
We are creatures who save. We are creatures who say this matters, so let it last a little longer if it can.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
“Flowers decompose, but knowing this does not prevent us from loving flowers. In fact, we are able to love them more because we know how to treasure them while they are still alive. If we learn to look at a flower in a way that impermanence is revealed to us, when it dies, we will not suffer… When we know that the person we love is impermanent, we will cherish our beloved all the more. Impermanence teaches us to respect and value every moment and all the precious things around us and inside of us.”
Pickling — in its own humble way — is practice for this. A way of cherishing. A way of hoping. A way of saying we know everything slips away, but we will hold on anyway.
Because the purpose of saving anything — money, health, memories — is the people we love.
If nothing else, save this
Truthfully, I’d like you to consider the wonder of pickles because the most wonderful thing about pickles is the people who love them.
My cousin Brandon loved pickles. Loved them with the kind of odd, delightful devotion that becomes one of the many small, silly, shining facts about a person you love, the kind you tease them about and then treasure secretly, because it is theirs, because it is them.
He passed away recently, far too soon, the way good people sometimes do, and losing him has made me realize how little we ever manage to preserve — how bad we are at it, really. How we always think we have time to call, time to visit, time to say the extra thing, time to tuck one more memory into the jar.
Brandon was the special kind of person who on the regular made moments you wanted to keep forever. He was not the life of the party — better yet, with an unforgettable laughter, he was the one who made the entire room a party of life. He made ordinary conversation feel like a small festival. He was open and compassionate in that rare, vulnerable way that makes you feel safe enough to offer your own secrets in return.
It’s ironic he loved pickles because he made life feel worth preserving. He made things better, just by being in them.
My oldest son loves pickles too — pickle sunflower seeds and pickle chips and even pickle cotton candy, for reasons I will never understand. I look at these things right now and think of Brandon, and there it is, the quiet ache and the quiet gift of memory: the way people keep living in the things they loved. The way the simplest objects become reliquaries.
To lose someone is to be reminded, sharply and without your consent, of what truly deserves our care. Not status. Not stuff. Not the noise of the world. But the people whose presence salts our days and gives them flavor. The little things that somehow become everything.
Paulo Coelho wrote:
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
Brandon did that. He made the world better in the small, crucial ways that don’t make headlines but make a life.
And now what I have — what we all have — are memories, lined up on the shelves of the mind like jars, imperfectly sealed, vulnerable to time, but ours for a little while yet.
And maybe that is enough.
Maybe that is hope.
Maybe that is the oldest magic of all, older even than pickles: the desire to preserve what we love, even knowing we cannot keep it.
