Last night I briefly awoke and turned on the light. Pop! It went out immediately and will never come on again, leaving me in the dark.
It’s like that way with us personally and healthwise in many ways.
One morning waking up, you feel inexplicable dizzy with pains in your chest.
Or you get a phone call in the night saying a member of your family was killed in a traffic accident.
Or you lose your job at work.
On and on. The fact of sudden change, often irrevocable and permanent in so many negative ways.
Our lives can change in a second on a dime or in a breath.
Nothing we perceive, apprehend, or limitedly understand is forever. All is susceptible to change and ending.
Sometimes people even experience a sequence of these brutal sudden endings.
There are, as always, myriad possibilities for every waking moment spared by a light not coming on. There is much to do and much to be done. Often we have many plans and unexpressed or unshared private dreams. And there is only so much time of unknown quantity. People feel this more when there’s less road than what’s back of the cart.
I, like others, am aware of money and what pleasures and possibilities it can bring, but, through my grandkids these daze, I also re-realize that life is so much more than about acquisition, materialism, and celebrity. It is far more about getting along with others and as many people as possible. It is about helping, sharing, and caring. It is about positive exchanges with others, sometimes even lifting others to realize their obvious potentials (a hangover from teaching thirty years and writing textbooks for senior high English students). And it is, above all, mainly about selfless love and making a gift of oneself to others.
These are decent, simple values worth living and dying for. And these are what still inspire me in a world lost and gone totally Trump-crazy.