What If?

What if you found out you were going to die tomorrow, or sometime in the way to near future? Would you change the course of your hours? Would the way you approached the minutes be altered in any profound way? Why don't we all live that way anyhow? Why do we wait for the shadows of age to creep up on us, or the dire diagnosis to be handed to us on the scribbled scroll of some doctor's official patient log? Why do we pass by the days resigned to whatever others choose to throw at our feet?  

Maybe I'm extra melancholic today for having spent part of my birthday afternoon visiting with the spirits of my Dad, Uncle, and two of my Grandparents. Maybe that's good, though. Sometimes, we gather a small amount of peace as we're wandering the silent stones of a cemetery, and we wonder why we feel that way when every other journey there has brought us only sadness and the weeping of our souls. And we realize that the reason we feel solace is because we've been offered the gift of awareness and gratitude, for the moment we're in and the moments that will hopefully arrive. I've had six more years of life now than my Dad did. If I have still more, what will I do with them? We should be mindful of how we answer such questions. We should make them good years, years filled with family, friends, kindness, grace, and living each moment fully and perhaps, at times feverishly. Each moment is the only one we truly exist within fully. 

More Leaving

This has been a place of leaving for a long time now, this place of heat and swelter.  I feel like I'm always the one speaking of leaving but it's always friends and acquaintances making the journey. I've said good bye to so many people since I've lived here, and the streets are beginning to feel lonely. Our neighborhood is lonely, the darkened streets no longer a place of camaraderie over long dog walks, the yard no longer a place of barefoot little girls and fishing trips off our dock. 

Still, this place, these walls and this grass and these trees are still home. I know that one day we will leave, maybe (hopefully) for mountains and forests and a place where winter means snow, and I'll probably be sad on some level.  Maybe I will even envy the ones remaining in place, if only because they're in the security of sameness.  Maybe not.  More likely, we'll be excited for new adventures, for new places to savor Sunday morning breakfasts and to hunt for treasures and to experience life together.  New moonlit roads to wander with the great white beast, new avenues to drive under the welcoming sun, new conversations in which to partake with new people. I think that the hardest thing about friends leaving is the loneliness that comes with knowing their adventures are now happening without us, and that we're still walking through mostly the same ones. We're happy for them, but the sadness still remains, a whisper at our shoulder that life will move forward but in a different way.

My prayer for the rest of this year into the next (besides that we all enter it healthy and whole) is that we don't allow ourselves to be held back by fear.  That we listen to the voices deep within and do our best to honor them, even when they scare the hell out of us and challenge us to part from the familiar and the safe.  From this comes true growth and real adventure.   So be it.