Death
It’s coming for all of us. I know, for some of you reading this, you just did a face palm and said, “Duh,” out loud. But some of you think that it is rude of me to come right out and say it that way. There are folks who think they are a half step from immortality. Granted, many of them are teens. We’ve all been there, right? Then there are those folks who just don’t want to talk about it. I used to be one of those people, especially when it came to thinking about certain people dying. But in the end, death is what is coming for all of us. Cheery beginning, huh?
I am thinking about death because we are attending our sixth funeral in three years. The competitive out there just started tallying up how many they’ve been to. Don’t do that. It’s not a competition, it’s a blog post about death. Okay, now that I have you all back with me, six funerals over the past three years, all involving family members or folks that might as well have been family members. It starts to put some things into perspective.
Having gone from someone who didn’t like to think about dying to one who is writing about dying, I have had to face my own imminent mortality. I can now accept that we are all headed for the end of our lives, some faster than others, unfortunately. So if we know what the end is, what are we doing about the right now? We can’t change where we’ve been, we can’t change the ending, but we can change the right now.
So what do you wish you were working on right now? What dreams and goals are going unrealized in your life? What chance that you swear you are going to take tomorrow are you waiting for? What piece of personal business are you leaving undone? And I know that you are dealing with all of these things because I am too. There are things that sound so much better if I get started on them tomorrow. But tomorrow is a gift that we may or may not get to unwrap. There is no guarantee except that we will run out of tomorrows. There’s a great line in the musical Les Mis (best show ever, by the way) that goes, “Here they sang about tomorrow, and tomorrow never came.” Marius sings that line when thinking about his compatriots that died. He alone is left to deal with tomorrow. Then there is a great song by Tim McGraw called "Live Like You Were Dying." That song reminds us that we need to make the most of what we have today.
Make the most today. Don’t wait to start on plans or dreams or goals or ambitions. Most of us don’t know when today is our last and we are out of tomorrows. Cheat death by working on things that matter today.