Life is a gift

My recent and unpleasant reminder of my own mortality was like a continuous stream of ice cold water fired at me with a high pressure hose. It made me shake; it hurt like hell and it woke me up!

Life is an incredibly precious gift. We can lock it away and treat it like some rare porcelain plate, hoping that it won't get broken. We can take it out of its locked cupboard, fill it with colourful, sinfully delicious sensory experiences and fill ourselves up on all that feeds the soul.

Stop waiting for life to happen, for dreams to be called into being. You are the caller; you are the creator. You are the one who lives this life, who lives their dreams into reality.

There is no tomorrow. There is only today. Make it a good one.

Endings and Beginnings

In the year now leaving the cosmic train station, my own mortality reached out and brushed its cold breath upon my soul.

Like so many others I am waiting. Will my biopsy take me from this limbo back into the world of the living or will it bring that cold breath closer and deeper? I am one of many waiting in that place of unknowing. I have no answer, no prescient glimpse of what the outcome will be. I wait, sometimes with quiet stoicism and sometimes I am swept up in storms of intense emotion.

Death is theoretical until it comes whispering at your door. We all know that it is the one great certainty in life and yet do we truly live our lives in the real knowing of its imminent ending? How would we live it differently if we were truly aware of its transient nature, immersed in the reality and not the theory?

This is our big chance, our day in the sun, our place centre stage. This day. This hour. This moment. Wrap it around you lovingly. Live it fully. Feel the truth of the gift that is life flowing in every cell. Embrace it as a lover. Give it all of you and suck the marrow from the bones of being.

This day, this hour, this moment. This is truth. This is life. Live it.