Living On

Well, time continues to go by, and much of the pain that we felt after learning that our friend had been wounded has faded. As our friend’s arms and legs have healed, so have our hearts begun that process. I am sure it will continue to hurt for a long, long time; the scars will surely fade, but they will not disappear. They cannot, as they are the reminders of lessons that we hope never to have to relearn:

1. Life is precious.

It’s so easy to take our lives on this earth for granted because we live them every day. We fall into our routines – going to work, coming home to make dinner, maybe hitting the gym, watching some TV, and finally falling into bed exhausted from one more 24-hour cycle. I know I have a bad habit of feeling like life is just a series of challenges we have to overcome. And it can be! Your boss chewed you out, you got a flat tire, you can’t seem to ever get ahead of the bills, and, to top it off, your ice cream melted while you waited in the Wal-Mart line. Yes, life can be hard, but think of all the things we miss when our focus is to get through the day. From now on, I am going to live through each day instead.

2. Life is not a guarantee.

I am in that young, invincible stage of life. At 26, I don’t think I should be thinking much about death. And yet, in the past few weeks, I often think of nothing but. As I shared two posts ago, I lived through a moment when I truly thought my friend had died. At 27. At one year older than me. At this young, invincible stage of life. The truth is that, as we live each moment, we can’t possibly know how many more we have. We have to be prepared for the possibility that any moment could be our last. No, it doesn’t mean we should all go out together to buy our burial plots, but it does mean that, as well as striving to live through each precious day, we must also live in each fleeting moment. We may not get another one.

3. Life is only as important as the people you share it with.

Life’s preciousness and potential brevity would mean nothing at all if we were here on this earth alone. But we’re obviously not; we are here together, for better or worse. It is our relationships that truly make our days precious and worth living through. And it is our relationships that matter when we realize we must live in our moments because they are not guaranteed to us. Have you ever told anyone that you can’t imagine living your life without them? And then, have you ever actually tried to imagine it? It’s painful but perhaps necessary if we want to obtain the truest, deepest understanding our precious existence on this earth.

With these hard-learned lessons, I end my series of blogs on my injured friend. It is time to move on, to take these lessons and live them out. Yes, the scars remain; but they serve as subtle reminders of what we have been through and how it has changed us. And we will continue to live in a way that honors our experiences, whether we stop for a moment to smell a flower in bloom, take the initiative to befriend a stranger, or simply hold on tighter to the people we love.