Living for something

Sometimes, as I stand and wait for the bus, profound things pass through my mind. I ponder them for a moment, and then they fly away.

I think that - perhaps - in my dazed morning state, I find these passing thoughts more profound than  they actually are. If I'm honest with myself.

Anyways, today I had one of these dazed morning states. I heard on the radio that a 27-year-old girl had died about 15 minutes from my house, that she attended the same university as me.

And I started to think about life, and living, and wondering why it is that we all go about living with the intention of tomorrow. We all have our goals, our dreams, our plans to get right with so and so, or to lose weight, to get rich and famous, to do something good at the most convenient time.

But we are never guaranteed tomorrow. Just right now, this moment.

One of the greatest truths of life is that when we die, we take nothing with us. We will not take our money, we will not take our homes, our cars, our perfect little lives. But we will leave behind a legacy - whether it be a short or a long one - in our friends, in our family, in the people we spoke to, the people we danced with, the people we smiled with, the people we helped in the midst of their distress. We also leave the people we hurt, the people we scorned, the people that we did not place on equal grounds with us. We can't simply live. We need to live for something. To live every moment with purpose and with intention and with love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness that we will someday need in return too. Possibly soon.

There's precious little time in life. We need to remember this, and value the people, things, and work around us accordingly. Because in the end, there's only a very few things that matter, and I think it's almost only at this last second that we finally realize what they were, and wish we'd put the value where it was due.