LIVE!

"Why fear tomorrow when today may be all we have?" - Anonymous

A friend of mine at the post office used to come in at all hours trying to keep caught up on a never-ending pile of work. He'd growl and curse and complain about all the same things that frustrate every employee everywhere, but he seemed to really care about doing a good job and put in lots of unpaid overtime. Thin as a stick, he smoked like a chimney, but he rarely missed work.

One day he experienced some weird tingling in his hand and went to a doctor to check it out. They told him he had cancer running rampant through his body and he would be dead within 6 months. I may be off by a couple weeks, but it seems to me he died about a month later.

Another friend of mine worked long hours at his computer job, sometimes 75 hours in a week. On his off time, he'd drive to Prague and work some more developing a business with a friend. A drunken off-duty Prague Policemen stabbed him to death.

A third friend was off in Scotland climbing mountains in April, and in May was struck down with Multiple Sclerosis. Overnight it seemed, she went from hiking the highlands to hobbling down the halls.

What's my point? Only that noone knows how much time we have here, and we often spend it in ways that don't really fulfill us, and we miss out on the important things at life. My friend who died of cancer, told me he regrets not spending more time with his son. I imagine my friend who was stabbed would wish now that he spent more time with his wife than at his desk.

Of course we have to work, and we want to provide well for our spouse and our children, but maybe your kid would appreciate playing catch in the yard with you a little more than buying him yet another video game. Or maybe he'd at least rather you played one of the old ones with him.

We as people spend a lot of time worrying about all the things we don't have, instead of reveling in all the things we do. In our drive to have more, we tend to forget how much we already have. We work more hours so we can buy more things, but we already have the greatest gift of all. Think for a minute about the people you love. This is what's important. Nobody is lying on their death bed thinking, damn I wish I'd spent more time at the office!

No matter how bad your life may seem, there are parts of it going great. Focus on them. Live in an attitude of gratitude! Maybe you don't have the money right now for a Wii, but you can be grateful that you have a car, or shoes, or a heart that has been beating for however many years without you even having to ask it! There is always something we can be grateful for!

I've been reading about Zen philosophy lately, and a major theme is living in the present moment. I think we could all benefit a little from that. We need to realize that a lot of the stuff we spend our energy being upset about, isn't really very important. If a car cuts us off in traffic, we might fume about this for minutes (or hours!) when the actual incident took a micro-second, and it is long over. Why waste precious moments of our lives being angry about something that is no longer here and now?

We only have so much time. Michael Landon, dying of cancer, advised: "Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows. "