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We Are Here but Not Forever; Live While You Can
Whatever you are putting off, do it now
It was a beautiful June morning — the kind of soft day that made you glad you were alive. Beneath an impossibly blue sky my knees were stained with dirt as I knelt in the flower bed planting flowers. At the same moment, my father arrived at work across town, rolled a set of blueprints out on the tailgate of his truck and collapsed to the same earth, under the same impossibly blue sky, and died of a massive heart attack. He was 61 years old.
I was 37 and was about to learn some hard lessons. One is that grief can fall out of beautiful blue skies and land on you like a suffocating black cloud, smashing not just your knees in the dirt, but your face, as well. No warning. Ready or not.
The other is that life is fragile, uncertain, and precious. There is no time to waste. Like Natalie Goldberg says in her book, The Great Spring,
“We are here, but not forever.”
How many of us really believe that? We seem to walk around with some kind of magical thinking that we have all the time in the world. This changes a bit as we get older, but we still don’t want to accept that we have an expiration date. We still put off the things we want to do for a more propitious time.
