Look at your life. Just really look at it. What do you see?
Family? Regret? Love or the unreciprocated? Success? Joy? The past? The future?
It really is beautiful, mysterious, and yet at the same time beautifully overwhelming in its mystery.
Or maybe the perspective is a little less existential. Maybe it’s easier to go with the mathematical sequential viewpoint: we’re born, we grow, we become adults, then die. That’s depressing. Then again, the truth often is in many cases.
It is truly a bit of both. While our earthly beings are bound by the restrictions of time, they are made stronger by the moments with people we encounter. While these too will have an end, the emotions connected to these moments are timeless. The power of these moments is proven in the evidence of basic psychology: in the fleeting simplicities we routinely encounter – a scent, a brush of skin, a sound – the rest trigger a memory that transports us to the past so vividly. We can even be led to extremes of trauma or euphoria. It is from the vivid nature of our memories that often causes two reactions: flight or fight.
Here is the true human interest story as we stand in the present life’s impossible circumstances, “in a road diverged,” looking at our past, present, and future.
Fight or flight – the choice happens in a moment, but time causes us to move forward in its catalystic impact without a redo.
Many will flight on this road, flee and decay with fear, losing all hope for tomorrow, and allowing the emotions of yesterday’s moments to paralyze the possibilities of tomorrow.
But maybe, just maybe, we’ll go against the commodity of our flight natures. In a split second choice, we choose to fight, choosing to allow the vivid nature of our memories’ emotions to propel us to look beyond the most probable outcomes of our impossible present and fight to change these outcomes for the betterment of our future.
To fight – when on the rare occasion we choose to not be paralyzed by the emotions of our past. To fight – when we choose to learn from the vivid reels of before to create a better reel in our future. To fight – to really test your humanity, to not be bound by the limits of what time has labeled our lives because the existential being within all of us believes we are not to simply live, but fight to be alive.
So again: look at your life. Really look at it. What do you see? Did you live? Did you fight to be alive? Choose wisely – the diverged road will not be there forever.
Kathryn Schauska is a customer and friend of vendor Michael Warner, who recently obtained housing and says he could not have done it without the support of community members like her. “I am grateful for those who have been there to mentor, love, listen and give me a much needed kick in the butt from a place of tough love,” Schauska said. “To you– you know who you are– I am forever grateful.”
