At each stage of my life, I have found myself surrounded by clusters of life events. At one point, it felt like every weekend we were attending weddings. I spent a lot of time thinking about love and romance and the meaning of it. I wondered whether I would find love and how I would know when I had found it. I wrestled with trying to understand the purpose of it. Mostly I wondered how love could turn into hatred so easily. Then, at another stage, it seemed like everyone I knew was having babies. I found myself contemplating the concepts of new beginnings and the potential that babies represent. My conclusion was that parenting was very important and I purposed in my heart to do well as a parent when my turn came. Currently, I find myself surrounded by a lot of death. In the last 5 years we have lost 6 relatives and a number of friends/acquaintances. Each such event has had its natural shock element but larger than that has been my contemplating of life. Its this that I want to talk about. Each of the people I have lost recently had very different lives and they died at all sorts of different ages and in different ways. All of them, however, had their worries and concerns, as do we all. This brought me to wonder, had they known when they were going to die, whether those things would still have been as important? Would it matter that the house was not perfectly tidy when a visitor came if one knew you only had a week or two or a year or two left? Would it matter that the car got scratched or a vase broke? If they knew that they only had ten years, would they have done a job they hated or would they have ventured out and tried something new? Would they have put up with someone treating them abusively? Would they have had a conflict with that person? When one views your daily concerns through that lense, they suddenly seem so much less important. Do I want to die and have people comment at my funeral that my house was always spotless or would I want them to say that I was always friendly and inviting, no matter my own schedule? Which brings me to… what do I want people to say at my funeral? What do I want my legacy to be? What do I want to have achieved? In those last moments when I think back, what regrets would I have? Life is so very short and we spend so much of our time worrying about truly unimportant things. One constant in life is change. Things are always changing. I have certainly experienced a lot of change to the structure of my family in the last few years. However, I think it has led me to think that I would rather live my life somewhat differently going forward. I think I want to start living backwards. I want to be asking myself whether this would matter at the end of my life? Whether this fits with the goals I would have wanted to achieve? Whether this is what I want people to remember about me? Sometimes I think we experience change like a boat out at sea not really knowing where its going but just negotiating the changing winds and weather as it comes and hoping to survive. If the boat achieves something, that’s great but its really rather hit and miss. I think I would rather stop my boat for a moment, figure out where its going and where I want it to go and then work my way backwards to where I am now and figure out a route. That way, even if I encounter hurricanes, I can still find my way on my compass and navigate my way back to the route that leads to my goals. The tone of this topic might seem a bit depressing but it really isn’t. I think that my being faced with my own mortality and having to process the loss of others has brought me to a very important point in my life. One that might alter the trajectory I am on and cause me to make different decisions. I think its good to stop, reflect and make changes and I am glad that I can use the experience of grief and loss to help me do exactly that. I hope that by sharing my reflections, it will mean something to someone else too. Life is short. Lets worry less about the unimportant things and concern ourselves more with that which brings quality to our lives and those of others. Lets embrace what we have and live it fully.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 23:34:32 +0000
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