The Future and the Present

Do you ever really think about your future? Your life and inevitable death? Will you die a quick death... a slow, painful death... or a beautiful painless death with all your loved ones surrounding you? Who in your family will die way before their time? Here, I'll make this personal, cause these really are my questions. Will I marry someone, and if so will it be soon or many years from now? How many kids will I have and will they look a lot like me? How many careers or fields will I venture into, things I never thought I'd do? Things I can't even imagine myself doing in my mind right now. Are there any things that I'll never try but have an unspeakable gift for - like drawing or painting, playing the violin or drums, quickly picking up a certain foreign language, easily breaking the code to cure a disease or solve a massive problem of diplomacy? What bandwagons will I jump on, and why? What will be the next thing to make me cry uncontrollably, as I haven't done since I was a kid, or laugh so hard that I pee my pants? Ha. What friends will I make that right now, I've never met, but someday I won't be able to imagine living without? So many questions about so many unlived years... What prompts these questions is that in so many ways, I am blessed and really happy. But things could change drastically in a minute. One bad phone call, one fall, one bomb, one thing... and everything will change. Not necessarily for the worse, but those things are easier to imagine!

But then I think about the present. It's like that old Van Halen video, with all the words going across the screen, reminding us what a big, wide world we're apart of. Right now someone is having a baby, and right now someone just watched their baby die in their arms. Right now, somewhere, a village is getting clean water from a well for the first time ever. Right now a person is so thirsty they are indeed dying. Right now someone just wrote their first song, someone just baked their first batch of cookies, took their first step. Right now someone took their last step ever, just said goodbye to a friend who will never again come back into their life. Right now someone got their dream job. Right now someone just found out they lost their job. Right now someone is murdering, and someone is being murdered, senselessly, another victim of human passion and rage. Right now someone is sitting behind the wheel of a car driving, and someone is in a canoe, and someone is skiing on one of the world's tallest mountains. Right now someone is falling down. Right now someone is so high that its illegal! Right now more than 6 billion different souls are inhabiting one world. So much goes on every minute, every right now. You should try this little mental exercise sometime. It's has an effect similar to what you feel after listing out the things you're thankful for... makes you rest in awe and smallness. When you're this small, nothing is quite so scary or lonely or stressful. And all the good things that come your way feel like love and life.