Eaten up by nothing

Every single person you have ever met is hurtling towards the same destination.

The billionaire.

The bus driver.

The king.

The comedian.

The person you envy.

The person who annoys you.

All of us are temporary.

And yet we spend so much of our lives behaving as though we’re immortal.

We hold grudges for decades.

We destroy friendships over politics and pride.

We worry endlessly about what strangers think of us.

We refuse to pursue our dreams because somebody might laugh.

We ruin entire afternoons because someone cut us up in traffic or forgot to reply to a text message.

Human beings are remarkable creatures.

We can contemplate the stars, write symphonies, fall hopelessly in love, and somehow still become irrationally upset because somebody took the last parking space at the supermarket.

Life is absurd.

Beautifully absurd.

One day, every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done will be forgotten.

Every possession you fought so hard to own will belong to somebody else.

Every argument you won will become meaningless.

The frightening thing is not that life is short.

It’s that we are so easily distracted from living it.

We are eaten up by nothing.

By worries that never happen.

By insecurities that do not matter.

By trivialities that steal years of our one extraordinary chance at existence.

Which brings us to today’s lesson.

Stop taking the wrong things seriously.

Take kindness seriously.

Take love seriously.

Take your dreams seriously.

Take your brief time here seriously.

But do not waste your precious days carrying bitterness, envy, resentment, or fear.

Call the person you miss.

Forgive someone.

Laugh more loudly.

Tell people that you love them while they are still here to hear it.

Stand outside occasionally and remember that you are alive on a tiny blue planet, floating through an endless universe, sharing a brief and miraculous experience with eight billion other confused human beings.

We’re all going to die.

What a circus.

So let us love one another while we may.

Because in the end, that was always the point of the whole ridiculous, beautiful thing.

If you’d like, I can make future pieces in this series even more poignant by ending with a single short “gut punch” line in the final paragraph.