As Hurricane Gustav appears to not be another Katrina, I am reminded of life's fragility. You're planning your Labor Day holiday when suddenly you're ordered by your mayor to evacuate your home because of "The Mother of All Storms," when you've already experienced the previous mother of all storms.
Alas, quiescent life is much more often instantly disrupted by other things: you lose your job, you get a middle-of-the-night call that your aging parent has an emergency, your annual checkup yields a diagnosis of cancer.
We're all on life's conveyer belt. If we're lucky, we slowly move along until, finally, at the end of the assembly line, we're taken off. But many of us fall off the line prematurely.
Let us take this opportunity to ask ourselves, "What's something I want to do more and less of in whatever time I have on the conveyer belt?"
I've considered life's fragility often. Many people are afraid of aging and dying, but any person can die at anytime, of a number of things. While humans can survive many situations, we can also die if something is off kilter in our bodies, either for a long period or a brief one; or if we're in a particular environment for just a little too long; or if we're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens every day.
ReplyDeleteWith this in mind, what I want to do less is worry unnecessarily. Of course some caution is reasonable. But sometimes I want to enjoy a fattening food and not worry about being fat. Sometimes I want to do my job and not worry about getting ahead. Sometimes I want to walk around my neighborhood at night and not worry about what I just saw on the news.
Perhaps if I worry a bit less, I can make my time on the conveyor belt a bit more pleasant.