Originally posted on Facebook HERE
By the time you really start to realize how little time you have, you really haven’t got much time left. Life on Earth is a crazy and amazing thing. How is it that we’re here in this reality at all? Why is there so much suffering? Why does everything die? What if we could live forever?… What if, once we got to age 21 we just stayed there, and we could be as healthy or unhealthy as we wanted to be but we knew we could never die – that this was it. Someone cuts our head off, we’d grow another one to replace it but we’d have that memory that would be in our mind forever. Die in a fire? Our body would regenerate, and now we’d have that memory. Would life be better if we were invincible? Or would we feel trapped? Like – this is it?… we can’t get out?…knowing we’re going to die gives the time we do have a certain sense of urgency. We don’t know what’s coming next, but we do know this is our current reality. As we age, we watch as family and friends move on, as the people we watched on TV and in the movies, as well as the musicians we listened to, all begin to pass away (except for Keith Richards, of course). And our own mortality starts to become much more real to us on an internal level. Time speeds up, too. Days feel like minutes, months feel like days, years just blow by. Suffering is built into life. Animals have to eat each other to survive, which means other animals have to die horrible deaths every minute of every day. Where does all that fear and pain go? We, as humans are constantly killing each other. There’s always a war somewhere. More fear, more pain, more anger, more hatred… more people looking to get revenge. We will lose people and things we value. It’s a fact of life. And life comes in waves, right? Sometimes, when everything just seems to be rolling along it seems like nothing bad will ever happen again. It’s easier to be happy during those times. Get behind a guy driving 6mph in a 20 year old Buick and just laugh it off, because everything is going great in your life, and this is your lesson in patience for the day. But what happens when you suffer a loss or two? What happens when someone does you wrong? What happens when you get a physical diagnosis you don’t want to hear?… hard not to let the bad times severely impair our thoughts and attitudes. I’m old enough now to have seen people get crushed by bad news. To have it have a really negative effect on them for the rest of their days. I’ve also seen people get terrible news, really awful like “you have two weeks to live” kind of news and handle it, at least outwardly, in ways I can’t even imagine. Just really use that time as wisely as possible, knowing the end was coming very, very soon. And therein lies the key. Because, my friends – the end is coming very, very soon. To me, I need to really focus on love, and service to others. I have to keep myself physically fit as well – what a gift we’ve been given. We need to recognize and honor that (IMO). But, we create our realities. Whatever happens to us, we decide how it will affect us. We decide what kind of life we’re going to lead. We decide if we’re going to do as much as we can to help others, to stay mentally and physically fit, and get to the end knowing we did everything we could to be as happy and productive as possible. Suffering is inevitable. Our response is up to us. Honor. Integrity. A kind and generous heart. A sense of humor. So many choices, so little time. Let’s get to the end and have people say they were better off for having known us. That – to me – says “a life well lived”.
