A journal entry about a vessel, a song, and a man who died the week I was singing along. On purpose, mortality, and why the measure of a life was never its length.
I made a new vessel this week. A face, the way I always make them, with open eyes and an open mouth, caught somewhere between a gasp and a song. While I worked, I had a track playing on repeat, the one a lot of you will recognise the moment you hear it. Oliver Tree. “Life Goes On.” I wrote those three words on the wheel bat beneath the pot, almost without thinking, the way you hum something under your breath. Then I posted it.
Only afterwards did I learn that the man whose voice I had been leaning on was already gone.
Oliver Tree died on the 14th of June, in a helicopter crash in Rio de Janeiro. He was 32 years old, in the middle of a world tour, posting from Brazil to millions of people only hours before it happened. Six lives ended in the sky that morning. And here I was, days later, in a studio in Lagos, building a clay face and playing his song about how life keeps moving, not knowing that his own had stopped.
I have not been able to shake it since. So I am writing it down, the way I now write everything down, because putting my hands to a thing is the only way I know to understand it.
The song outlived the singer
There is something almost unbearable, and almost holy, about what happened here. A man recorded a song called “Life Goes On.” Then his life ended. And the song did exactly what it promised. It went on. It is still in millions of videos. It is still in my studio. It is, in a strange and tender way, still in his own mouth every time someone presses play, even though that mouth is silent now.
For most of my life this idea frightened me. The thought that the world simply continues after you, that the songs keep playing and the wheels keep turning and the city keeps moving and almost nobody pauses, used to feel like the loneliest thing imaginable. When I was in my own dark season earlier this year, that fear had teeth. The world will not even slow down for me, I thought. It will just carry on.
I see it differently now, and I want to share the turn with you, because it is gentle and it took me a long time to find.
The world moving on is not the world forgetting you. It is the world carrying what you gave it. Oliver Tree is gone, and yet his work is now doing the living for him, travelling into rooms he will never enter, comforting people he will never meet, including, this week, a potter in Lagos he never knew existed. That is not erasure. That is a kind of immortality that has nothing to do with being remembered by name and everything to do with what you put into the air while you were here.
His family said his legacy will live on forever, and that he had already set up something before he died, a fund to put more art and more joy into the world. A man who knew, somehow, that the point was never to hold on. The point was to hand something over.
Length was never the measure
Here is the thing I most want you to sit with, the thing I keep returning to at the wheel.
We are taught to measure a life by how long it lasts. We mourn the young as though the tragedy is only the years they did not get. The years matter, of course they do. But the more I look, the more I am convinced that length was never really the measure of anything.
Think about it honestly. Jesus, by most accounts, died at 33. Two thousand years later we still speak his name in nearly every language on earth. Tupac was gone at 25, and people who were not even born when he died can recite him line for line. Oliver Tree had 32 years, and his voice will outlast most of us who are still breathing. Meanwhile there are people who reach ninety having touched almost nothing and left almost nothing, whose long lives passed through the world without leaving a fingerprint on it.
So the question was never how many years you are given. The question is what you pour into the years you have. Purpose is the real currency. A short life spent fully on the thing you were made for can weigh more than a long one spent waiting for permission to begin.
I find this freeing rather than frightening. It takes the pressure off the clock and puts it somewhere I can actually do something about. I cannot control how long I get. I can control whether I spend my hours on what matters to me, on the clay, on the people I love, on the small daily act of making something true. If today were somehow the last of it, the measure would not be the count of my years. It would be whether I used them on purpose.
Do not give your whole life to one painful moment
On the vessel this week, I wrote a thought that has been circling me for a while. You can dedicate your entire life to one painful moment. You can hand it all your time, every hour, every year, and let that single wound become the thing you organise your existence around.
I know this temptation intimately. I wrote to you last week about the two months I lost to depression, about the dark that nearly kept me. It would be easy, even now, to make that the centre of everything, to let one painful season define the whole shape of me. Pain is greedy that way. Given the chance, it will ask for all of your time, and it will keep asking.
But life is short, and it goes on whether you spend it grieving or building. The caption under my reel said it better than I can. Most things end long before we stop holding onto them. We keep gripping the moment that hurt us long after the moment itself has passed, and in doing so we let it steal time that the moment no longer even needs.
Oliver Tree’s death reminded me how little of it we are promised. None of us knows whether we have decades or days. So why would I give years of my one short life to a wound, when I could give them to the work, to the people, to the joy I am actually here to make?
What I want you to take from this
Whatever you are feeling right now, and I mean whatever it is, the grief, the failure, the heartbreak, the quiet weight that will not lift, do not let it bury you. Feel it, name it, put your hands to it, and then keep moving, because the alternative is to give your one short life away to a feeling that will not stay forever anyway.
Spend your time on purpose. Not on impressing anyone, not on outliving anyone, but on doing the thing that is yours to do, fully, while you can. If a song can outlive the man who wrote it, then so can a vase, a kindness, a child raised well, a person you encouraged, a thing you built with shaking hands on a morning you did not feel ready. That is how a short life becomes a long echo.
And be gentle with the time you are given. Life goes on. That is not a cold fact about how easily the world replaces us. It is an invitation. The world keeps moving, so move with it. Make something. Mean something. Let your hands leave a mark while they still can.
Rest well, Oliver. The song is still playing. We are still listening. And the rest of us, for as long as we have, will try to do the same with whatever we are given.
Life goes on. So let yours count while it does.
With you, Idris (Clay of Lagos)