To my friends and their Big Dreams

 Just an old, saved, QOTD from Slim:

Just a thought for the day.

I've heard so many people say "I'll do that when I'm older, when I lose 20 pounds, when I'm retired".

We got through life saying "I would, but it probably wouldn't work out" or " I'd like to but. . ."

We too often base our actions on an artificial future, painting a life picture based on an expectancy that time is more than sweat, tears, heat and mirage.

You can't count on anything.

For out of the blue, fate can come calling.

In a flash, what was once an unlimited horizon is the honed blade of a life gone short, robbed even of the power to grieve for what is ending.

           

I stand outside on a pale crescent of beaten earth and breathe deep.

I feel every ache in my muscles, I feel my skin, hot under the sun, the savage, fecund smell of loss in the air, laying heavy in the loud silence.

Somewhere in the distance is a soft clap of thunder, overhead clouds stray deliberately across the earth, disconnected from mechanical time.

I'd rather be elsewhere; the smell simply that of kitchen and comfort, the sounds; only that of laughter.

But I know how lucky I am, to simply be, in this moment and alive.

           

You can continue your day and do nothing, standing in brooding and irretrievable calculation as if casting in a game already lost.

Or you can seize the moment, the days, wringing every last drop from them.

Remind your loved ones you love them.

If there's someone that means the world to you and you've never told them, tell them now.

Hug your family, forgive an enemy (but remember the bastard’s name), give the dog an extra biscuit.

Then step outside into the sharp and unbending import of Autumn, a dying summer flaring up like fading flame, one last taste, one last memory, never knowing how long it will remain.

-Posted by Brigid on her blog