I watched the sand in an hour glass today fill up the bottom by sacrificing the top. I couldn’t look away. It was fascinating and thought provoking. The sand fell unceremoniously. If fell consistently, without fanfare or any excitement. If I didn’t watch it, it would still continue what it was meant to continue and much is the same with our own lives.
We are all the same, here to laugh and cry a while, for a period of undisclosed time, in order to discover how much we enjoy the act of living. And that’s just it. While the time that passes through is falls at a steady rate, unemotionally and unequivocally, our lives speak loudly how much we enjoy the act of living.
Some people live for the weekend. They make a mathematical miscalculation and trade in five wondrous days for a mere two, and two after a few cocktails, that they won’t even remember. They are the same people who hate what they do for a living, hope for the fate of six numbers of the lottery to change their lives, and once a year, they run away on a one or two week vacation, so that they can keep warm, drink some rum, and forget.
But the sands of time keep falling. They keep falling, and it doesn’t matter what day off the week it is. It makes no difference if is Wednesday, Monday, or Friday. Time marches forward, regardless of labels and feelings, and despite our best efforts to ignore or forget that it is there. And so we grow older. Our skin loosens, our hair falls out, various parts of us we didn’t know we had begin to ache and tremble, and yet we still miss the signs older before we realize that we’re older. Some of us become tragic misguided caricatures of ourselves, in an futile effort to try and fight the natural and intended effects of aging.
The sands of time and are failing bodies force us to leave the past behind, and ask perhaps for the first time in our lives, what was it all for. It’s not a terrible thing. Far from it. It’s like the master of the universe knew we would be so easily distracted by shiny objects, and misbehave if left on our own. So the passing of time reminds us that it is not important to survive but to live. It is more important to love, that to suffer a broken heart. It is far more important to believe and fight for a just cause, than to fall into pessimism, and avoid taking sides.
The hourglass is a most fascinating thing. It begs you to account for where you have been, but more importantly, far more importantly, it wants you to think where it is you want to go. How do you like being alive? Being fully human and fully alive? Breathing and soaking in all of it, not just picking through all the cheap items, and though life was nothing more than one big yard sale.
Who is going to miss you when you’re gone? That’s it, isn’t it? Who is going to miss you when you’re gone? Really miss you. Think about you. Remember. Wish you were still here.
Who is going to miss you when you’re gone?
It’s not the ‘gone’ part of the sentence that should keep you up at night. It is rather the thought that you’ve made no significant impact by being alive, that you drew a breath but haven’t really lived. You took without giving, you used without sharing, and you waited for the weekend to begin something you should have been doing all along.
Cover photo generously provided by photographer Neonbrand via unsplash.com
