Happy Sunday Everyone:
Last couple of weeks have been weird, hard, and sad. Four people passed away in the last two weeks that I know. These people all have loved ones that will miss them, they all have their story, and their stories are all very important. One of the people that passed was the father of one of Jack’s teammates on his football team. It was unexpected. His mom passed away last year, and he doesn’t have brothers or sisters, it’s hard to comprehend a 15 year old dealing with that. His dad was a Police Officer, and to watch him carry his dad’s casket and receive his dad’s United States Flag was one of the hardest things I’ve witnessed in my life.
Prior to the service, I met with my friend Don who I meet with every Tuesday at 7:30. Don is one of the wisest, most experienced humans I’ve known, and certainly a mentor to me. He had just come back from Tucson after helping eulogize one of his friends who had just passed. As I was telling him about what was happening, he shared the following with me, which had just been shared with him from a friend who had just lost his mother (all of this in two weeks).
“We must all become familiar with the thought of death if we want to grow into really good people. We need not think of it every day or every hour. But when the path of life leads us to some vantage point where the scene around us fades away and we contemplate the distant view right to the end, let us not close our eyes. Let us pause for a moment, look at the distant view, and then carry on. Thinking about death in this way produces true love for life. When we are familiar with death, we accept each week, each day, as a gift. Only if we are able thus to accept life–bit by bit–does it become precious.” – Albert Schweitzer
Don and I talked about what this meant, big picture, and to us individually. To me, it’s a line, and that line is our life, and obviously at the end of the line, is death. The line can be short, medium, or long. It can be happy, sad, or blah. It can be full of love, hate, or indifference. It can have a lot of regret, minimal regret, or no regret. It can be full of growth, or full of settling for what is. It can be whatever we want it to be. For me it is also about being present. I believe what Albert Schweitzer is saying is we can look at death in the future, and be scared of it i.e. close our eyes, or we can understand that we will all be there at some point, and if we can think about the line of life, i.e. the view right to the end, and find a way to appreciate every moment of our life until the end, then the vantage point, as distant or close as it may be, is less important. If we consider that this life will end, without being scared, we focus/force ourselves to be more present. If we work to appreciate most of the moments of our life, we die with gratitude and love…sign me up for that because I’m going regardless. Don reads these Sunday thoughts and probably won’t love this comment, but if Don died tomorrow, his family and friends would miss him, but he’d have a smile on his face, I guarantee it. He represents what is above, he has worked through a brain tumor, prostate cancer, and most recently, pancreatic cancer, yet he stays present and positive…it’s a daily ritual and its proof to me that this outlook on life works. He is always present.
To find gratitude in comparing yourself to someone else’s situation who has it worse than you is not a good way to go. I never want to say I’ve got it good because of how bad someone else has it. With that said, I believe we owe it to the people around us who experience pain and suffering to not just sit there and be sad for them but to adjust and adapt our own lives to be better while we’re here, to find more joy and be more present daily. Possibly more than anyone else receiving this, I need to remember this. It’s my biggest challenge, being present, finding gratitude all the time, and enjoying the journey day to day, although writing it out helps. One day at a time!!
Enjoy your Sunday.