Writing about coming back to life

Writing has been the least of my priorities these past few weeks, so it is with an almost unfamiliar fervor that I pick up my blog again this week.

As some of you know, my family went through a recent bereavement.

I come back to my life as it was in many ways a changed person.

I knew it all along, but this recent experience brought home to me with all the force of a sudden punch in the gut how fragile human life really is, and how transient.

One day you are here, smiling, talking, breathing in the crisp spring air and the next your lifeless body is carried away in a car, a van or a truck, never to come back again to those who love you.

It is a sobering thought, one which needs to be remembered….
…… while we bicker about trivial things (things which really won’t matter once we are gone),
…… when we stress the negatives in our lives over the positives (life is too short to focus on negatives alone),
……when we put off all the things we want or really need to do (as if we had all the time in the world to do them in)
….and the list goes on.

I suppose a life on which the shadow of death hangs all the time wouldn’t be much of a life, so it would be mad to think of the day we die ALL the time.

But it couldn’t hurt to remember from time to time the irrefutable fact that I am a perishable creature, especially when my ego comes in the way of my happiness, or when I am too lazy to do something or too driven to take a break, or too shy to speak of my love.

Keeping in mind the fact that I am here for a limited time could only help add that little bit of much-needed perspective.

It would help me live with an added feeling, a tangible poignancy: not to just exist from day to day to day, but to live each day to its fullest, beautifully and with meaning.