The Brevity Of Life

Life goes fast (or said another way, life seems too short).

That is what the word brevity tries to capture, how our quickly our time on this planet seems to go. How we perceive that time often changes throughout our life. As children, a day when we were bored seemed to last forever. Into your teens, there is a sense of acceleration, of time beginning to speed up. As early adulthood is entered, and the responsibilities increase time begins to slip away. Deadlines begin to loom. We begin to slowly take on things that we could not have imagined, long term commitments that are tied to financial promises (student debt to go to school, debt to borrow for things we need and want) and societal obligations. One day, you look around and your schedule is full so you start to steal from the necessary cycle of recuperative sleep to fit in the desires of the heart. Work during the day, socialize late into the night. Sleep and wake. Repeat.

Year after year, the clock goes faster. You seem to blink and another season has passed. Beyond your youth, if you are lucky to have not experienced it earlier, those older than you or sicker than you begin to die. At their memorial services, you can get a small sense of your own mortality, at how we seem to live on "borrowed time". The cycle of reproduction is happening and friends and family welcome new members into your sphere of influence. Birth. Growth. Death. Joy. Pain. Suffering.

There comes a time, or times, when you wake up from the living dream that is your life and you ask, am I living it or is it living me. For some, this awareness may never come. For some, MEANING comes from being aware of the cycle of life, the requirements to both exist in the NOW, remembering the past while planning for a future that may not come. For you, today, have that choice.

Will you choose to become conscious of who you are? Or would you prefer to sleep...