“Life is neither a glorious highlight reel nor a monstrous tragedy. Every day is a good day to live and a good day to die.” --Kilroy J. Oldster
By the time this piece goes public I’ll have celebrated another birthday, not quite as big a one as last year (six whole decades!) but still a demarcation line in time that gives me pause. I’ll be 61 years old. No turning back. No way to reverse my course to my fifties or better yet, my twenties, though I did do a lot of bonehead things during that decade. But that’s another essay.
Sixty-one.
If I live to at least the average life expectancy of an American male, 77.8 years, that means I have about 17 years left, and worse, because of COVID, I lost a year in 2020, because the pandemic pushed that number downward, in its biggest drop since World War II. That’s sobering. If I was playing golf, you might say I was on the back nine, hole number 15 or so. Gulp. In baseball I’d be standing up at the park to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the seventh inning. Yikes. My heart has already beat some 2,135,000,000 times so I’ve theoretically only got 493,500,000 to go.
Be still my heart. Wait, NO!!
I don’t mean to sound fatalistic, but birth and death are the great equalizers in God’s Creation. We all come into this world squirming and squawking and taking that first breath and we’ll all one day leave this world with one final sigh. Thus, it’s the in between times we should be most concerned about, not the beginning and not the end either. Our exit is already planned and so the real challenge is in what we choose to do with the days that we do have left.
As an adolescent I might have imagined that life goes on forever, but now? Life is urgent in a way. Life is that much more precious by its finitude. It makes me think I need to heed the life philosophy offered by a character in Stephen King’s novel about prison life, “The Shawshank Redemption”. Facing into the daily challenges of incarceration, Andy Dufresne knows the only thing he has control over in his locked down environment is how he chooses to live each day. To use well, or not so well, the 24 hours he is given daily. And so, he names the choice all humans face, as the days and the months and the years roll on buy.
“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
It's not just our biological age that brings us to this inflection point. I know that the past twenty months of these COVID times has taught me to wake up somehow from the slumber of merely sleepwalking through life or just going through the motions, or worse, imagining that some magic day called “tomorrow” will be the place where finally, we will be happy or content. As in, “When I retire” then life will be good or “when I fall in love” then life will come through or “when I have a child” then I’ll feel fulfilled. But the truth is all we have is today. There is no day but today, to quote a favorite song.
So, yes, we all are, getting busy living or getting busy dying. God help me to choose life!
Living, as in forgiving quickly and not holding a grudge or nursing a resentment. Living, as in spending as much time as possible with the people whom I love and who love me back. Living, as in pursuing the passions that bring me the most joy in this life and not spending so much time on empty pursuits like staring at my phone zombie-like, tapping and swiping, as if there is life to be found in a machine. Living, as in getting outside every single day and appreciating how beautiful Creation is, with its golden sunrises and multi-colored leaves falling to the earth and a sky so blue it takes my breath away. Living, as in remembering I am just one soul in this interconnected world, and so I must be care-filled in how I live and take full responsibility for how my how behavior effects other souls for the good or for the bad. Living, as in believing that a power so much greater than myself put the whole of existence together and that’s a miracle.
Maybe 61 is a good age after all. Makes me want to not waste a second, not even one. Busy living. Busy dying.
What will it be?
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