"Life is long if you know how to use it." —Seneca
I have always held other people's expectations for me a bit suspect.
While I believe that others have the best intentions for me, I think that our hopes and fears for each other are often colored by our hopes and fears for ourselves. This makes the task of finding our own way much more difficult and complex because, in the process of making ourselves happy, we run the risk of making those around us unhappy. Once-beloved relationships become the unintended casualties of our need to find harmony in ourselves.
In writing the soundtrack of our lives, we must decide how fast or how slow we want it to go, when we seek to create harmony, and when we don't, when we borrow influences from others, and when we invent a whole new rhythm or chord. But the one thing we cannot decide is how long it will play.
Time is the only resource in each of our lives that is truly finite, and with each day that passes, we have even less to work with. It quietly slips away, measured by this silent metronome that keeps ticking in the background even while we sleep. And yet we live as though we were unaware.
We spend our time doing things that do not make us happy and we don't make enough time to embrace the things that do. Until something happens that startles us awake—a tragedy of our own, or a tragedy of someone else's—that restores our sense of urgency to do the things that make this life worth living, and make us worth remembering.
Where is the music in your life?
Comments