Truth Bomb Tuesday: We’re here for a good time, not a long time.
If it’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that life is short.
So short.
It’s one of the great tragedies of life is that you just don’t appreciate how short life is until you’re most the way through it.
When I was young, the rest of my life was a road that seemed to stretch of forever. There was no end in sight.
Even by the end of my twenties it still felt like I had oodles and oodles of time.
What did it matter if I wasted a day? Or a month? Or a year?
There was plenty more.
I can’t tell you what I’d give to have those days back again. With all that energy and optimism and effortlessly fabulous hair.
But those days are gone. And now I have more dreams than I probably have days left.
Life is just short.
Now some of us will push back against this idea. We refuse to accept that our end is coming down the line. Or we tell ourselves that there’s still time to do the things we want to do. Or we somehow hold on to hope that scientist might cure death at some point, just around the corner.
Denial is always easier than facing the fact that we’re running out of time.
But then others of us will take the knowledge of how short life is and work ourselves into a mild panic. We get a sense that curtain is coming down, and we work ourselves into a tizz.
It’s not easy to accept that life is short and that you’ll be shuffling off to join your ancestors wherever they are at some point, probably sooner than you’d like. It takes a tough mind. And for the most part, in our society, we just like to politely ignore death and pretend it isn’t a thing.
We never build that mental toughness and resiliency.
But that’s a shame. Because if we can, something wonderful happens.
We go into savour-mode.
We start savouring our days and our experiences, because we know they’re limited. Even something as simple as feeling the sun on your face can be a profound experience.
And then feeling the sun on your face on your own private boat bobbing about the Whitsundays is positively ecstatic.
Life is short.
This should be a rallying call to action but it should also invitation to savour everything life has to offer.
And I don’t mean that kind of numb consumption that most of us fall into. I mean really savour it.
Drink it in. Soak it up. Get involved.
Take it from an old girl.
Life is short.
DB.