Tag: Time

Let Love Win

Words fail me today.

Words fail me because I shudder to think what will become of the world that we live in when hate and pain and senseless violence flooding our news outlets are becoming the norm. I can’t fathom living the rest of my life in a world where people make decisions out of fear, without truly grasping the permanency of one impulsive choice. I don’t want to believe that we live in a world where love doesn’t win, because to me, it’s the only thing we have.

It’s hard to stomach living in a world where I’ve woken up every day this weekend to another tragedy — another brutal attack. A preventable crime. Parents are now left to explain to their children that their favorite singer — a talented, beautiful, young woman, was ruthlessly killed when all she was doing was what she loved — meeting fans and signing autographs. Concerts are supposed to be fun. Music is supposed to be healing. I don’t want to believe we live in a world where kids have to fear going to concerts, where artists who dedicate their lives to sharing their craft with us, have to live in fear that if they so much as snub a fan, that suddenly, their lives at at risk. I don’t want to believe we live in a world where people are threatened, harmed, hated, killed, every single day because someone else has a problem with who they love. I don’t want to believe that I live in a world where we have to fear going to Church, or going to a bar, or going to a movie theater, or going to a concert.

I don’t want to live in a world where fear wins. Before you cast your vote, please cross fear right off your ballot. Love wins this election. Love has to win.

Tragedy strikes for all kinds of unexpected, incomprehensible reasons, and I’m not so sure it’s our job to figure out why. Maybe these things happen to remind us just how precious and fragile life is. Maybe it’s to remind us to never go to bed mad at someone else, to always say sorry, to always make amends. Or maybe tragedy happens to remind us to keep believing that magic is still real and that love trumps all, but to not let our own naivety keep us from looking out from under our rose-tinted glasses. There are monsters in this world — real monsters that ruthlessly and mercilessly take lives over petty things.

Maybe these things happen to remind us to keep searching for peace, and to give out our love to everyone in our lives before our time here is up.

Life is so unpredictable; these things happen and they rattle us, they remind us of our transience here on this earth. They shake us up, whisper in our ear to never let a moment pass us by. And then we suddenly forget. Life for us seems to continue to move on after tragedy strikes. I hope that you don’t let that happen this time, because for the people affected by the violence and the hate and the pain, they don’t just get to walk away. They don’t just get to keep on living their lives. Normal is no longer their normal. We have to keep searching for peace.

I think we often forget how lucky we really are — myself included. It’s so easy to get caught up in the drama of our own lives that we forget just how lucky we are to have this life and to have the privilege to live it — to love and be loved in return. We can walk, we can talk, we have an abundance of opportunities waiting for us if we only just take them. We have the free range to meet new people daily, to get to know them, to share their hearts and share our own. We only get this one chance. That’s it. We get one chance to do this damn thing. We get one shot at putting ourselves out there, at making a difference, at changing our little part of the world. We get one chance at loving right. At spreading love. At showing the people in our lives what they mean to us. At working towards finding peace.

These are the things I need from you:

I need you to go ahead and wear that dress that you think is a little too bright. I need you to eat the cake. Order the Venti Frappucino. Go out for ice cream with an old friend at 2 am and sit on the beach talking about the ways you want to change the world. Encourage each other. Believe that maybe you can be the one who can do it, maybe you can be the one that sparks a little change. Send the text you’ve been waiting a month to send. Screw fear. Punch fear right in the face and don’t worry about what is waiting on the other end of that text. You did your part, the rest is on them. Learn the importance of humility and go out there and be humble. Take accountability for all your wrong-doings. Say sorry. Say sorry and mean it. In fact, when you say anything, please mean it. Say yes to adventures and stepping out of your comfort zone. Anyone that knows me can attest to this: there is nothing I love more than canceled plans, but there is also nothing I regret more than watching as I cross off days on my calendar and seeing that we are already halfway through the year and I spent so much of my weekends off sitting on my couch watching Netflix.

Don’t stay with someone just because you are afraid of what the world would be like from the vantage point of being alone. There is so much bravery in coming to terms with your own independence. You can do it. You can be brave, too.

Say yes to weddings, and showers, and bachelorette parties. Say yes to driving around with your best friend with no end point in mind, reminiscing on the good ol’ days. Say yes to paint and sip nights when you don’t have one artistic bone in your body. Say yes to doing something new — to having wine and cheese with old girlfriends or trying to new Vegan restaurant a few towns over.

Book a road trip to visit a friend who moved states away. Pick up the phone and call your best friend. Talk about real things — the things that hurt you, the things that you are hopeful for, the things that you want. Put your phone down and look up. Life is much better experienced through your own set of eyes than that of an iPhone screen. Do the things that make you feel alive. Do them over and over and over again.

And above all, be kind. Be loving. Kindness trumps all. We have to believe that. We have to believe that at the end of the day, kindness matters. Kindness still wins. Even when the world around us is scary. Even when it’s dark. Even when it’s violent.

Today, please remember to just love each other — love each other well. Make sure they know it. Make sure everyone that you love knows how special they are to you and how important they are to you. And decide. Decide today if you want to live from a place of love, or from a place of fear. Decide if you want to live with hate in your heart or with love bursting from it.

I hope you choose love, because at the end of the day, after the sun sets, after all the bodies are laid to rest, after the world goes back to work tomorrow and starts to slowly forget, after the politicians rattle off their own reasons as to why our world is like this, I just need to know that there is still good to be found — that there are still things that matter.

And though I don’t have all the answers, I know this much is true: kindness is so, so important. Love is so, so important. Without kindness, there is no hope. Without love, there is no peace. Hate is a real thing, but so is peace. So is love. I need to know that love wins. It just has to. Please, let love win.

Please Don’t Miss The Point

To the sweet stranger I see at Dunkin Donuts every morning – 

You probably have no idea who I am, and why should you? You and I are nothing more to each other than strangers passing by on our morning journey towards being appropriately caffeinated. The truth is, I find myself thinking about you — probably more often than I should. I think about the way you come staggering in not far behind me, around 7:25 every morning. I think about the way the employees greet you with a, “good morning, Sir! The usual?” and have a large coffee with milk and two sugars, a glazed donut, and the paper ready before you get to the front of the line.

Beyond the morning routine, I wonder about you. I’ll be frank; I wonder if you’re happy. You carry your head like you’ve been sucker punched by life, but the soft creases around your eyes and mouth make me believe that despite the losses, your life was filled with joy. And even though you are merely just a stranger, I really hope that’s true. I really hope you lived a life that you are proud of and that you are able to look back and say you did all you could. I hope you never missed the point.

It’s become second nature for me to see people passing by and feel this tremendous need to know them.

Sometimes, I see older couples walking arm in arm, and I draw up a picture of how sweet their love must be. I map out a story about high school sweethearts who built a life together, and weathered their way through the storm of growing older, and still somehow found home in each other’s eyes. I see people eating alone at a diner and a sinking feeling crushes me to my core. I go over all the potential ways their story led them to sitting alone in the corner of that diner. I think about the spouse that died, leaving them with nothing but memories and a seat in their favorite breakfast spot. I see young people walking through the park with their infant baby and I wonder if they realize how very lucky they are to be filled with so much love in their lives. I see teenagers at the mall, surrounded by a sea full of their friends, and I wonder who they are beyond the poorly done makeup, latest trend of clothes, and hair styles that will go out as quickly as they slid in.

The truth is, I spend a lot of time fearing the concept of time, and desperately trying to look towards strangers in the hopes that their eyes will lock with mine and I will feel some sort of comfort in knowing that I am not alone.

These days, the fear of time seems to be the uninvited house guest that’s crept her way into my life and set up camp inside my heart.

I sometimes miss the naivety that came with childhood and the bubble of invincibility that we lived in. We saw the future as this elusive fairy tale, and when we made plans for who we wanted to become, we saw no path but a straight one leading us right there. All we saw was an infinite number of possibilities — an infinite number of chances to get it right — an infinite amount of time.

It wasn’t until things happened to us — when life happened, when tragedy struck, did we realize how fragile our time here was. And after facing heart break, or death of family members, or fatal car accidents involving peers we just saw in class the day before, we put our fists in the air and promised to live each day like it’s our last. We proclaimed the cliche and thought we really meant it, and we did, until we found ourselves right back where we were: going through the daily motions, but never really sinking our teeth into making our stay here matter.

The problem is we always think we’re going to have more time. We rationalize putting things off because we are busy — because we’ll have another chance. We think we’ll have another opportunity to go after what we wanted for ourselves ten years ago. We think we are given an infinite number of chances to fall off our bikes and get right back up to start over again. We push off doing what we want to do because there will be more time to chase what makes our hearts full. We think we’ll have more time to catch up with family and friends that we haven’t seen. We think we’ll have more time to tell that boy how we really feel. And even though we know that time is never a guarantee, we somehow are so convinced that we are the exception to this.

Let me tell you a thing or two about time. Time wasn’t on my friend Pat’s side when he was walking on that dark road that February night in 2009 and his life was cut short at only 21 years old. Time was not on my neighbor’s side, the healthiest man I knew, who fought his way down to his very last breath after a cancer diagnosis and a stroke that took everything from him. Time wasn’t on my side when I put off watching the movie Groundhog’s Day with him because he told me for years the movie reminded him of the time he drove me around getting my working papers signed when I was 15 and applying for my first job. Time wasn’t on my aunt’s side when she was diagnosed with cancer and suffered tremendously right down to her last day. Time wasn’t on my cousin’s sides, when all the adults in their lives scrambled to find them a stable home after my aunt died, only to leave them broken and drowning in a custody battle when they were in their early teens. Time was not on my side when I thought that green eyed boy would still be around when I was ready to let my guard down. The point is that time is not our friend. She won’t always be on our side.

Time is a constant reminder that our stay here is finite. That this space we occupy is never for keeps, but only for rent, and we never know when our lease is going to be up.

And I guess that’s the fear, really. I fear that if I blink, I’ll miss something. I think that’s why I cling so fiercely onto strangers that I pass by. I wonder if they’ve ever felt the same way.

I don’t want to miss the point in all of this. I don’t want to sit around, stewing in the fear that I will never hit that bar that I set for myself. I want to run towards it. I want to hit that bar. But I find that I’m stuck sometimes — paralyzed, even.

– – –

I’m realizing that all we really are are just bits and pieces of matter.

We are grains of sand; we are tiny specks on a screen shot of the planet. We are so, so small in comparison to how vast the universe really is. We are inconsequential fragments occupying this space. But small or not, we are here. And it is our duty, our job, to make something out of the time we have. What we do with our time matters. What we do with our lives matter.

The older I get, the more that I’m finding that if you don’t pay close attention, if you even, for one second blink, you’ll miss out on some chances.

I hope you never keep your eyes closed long enough to ever miss the point. I hope you don’t wish time away. I hope you don’t miss the important moments and the not so important ones and realize that they count too. I hope that even when you are so caught up in the hustle and bustle of every day life, that you slow down. I hope you wake up early enough one summer morning and really soak in a sunrise. I hope you watch a snowflake land on your palm and revel in the beauty of what it means to be unique — that just like snowflakes, we are all uniquely made. Similar to others, but not quite the same. I hope you find the kind of love that makes your heart swell ten times its size and I hope you take the time to really be in love. I hope that when you’re sitting with an old friend, ranting and raving about life, that you’re really listening. I hope you hear through her whining that she really needs you. That she’s struggling, but that she doesn’t want to admit it. I hope you are able to put down the phone and see life through your own pair of eyes, and not through the scope of a four inch screen.

I hope you make the decision to go after the dreams that keep you up at night. I hope you chase the things that make your heart full. I hope you do something that you feel matters. I hope you find the courage to walk away from people who no longer serve you. I hope you find the strength to leave a dead end relationship. I hope you find the bravery to be okay with being alone, because that is better than being lonely lying in bed next to someone.

I hope you always feel seen. And I hope that you see others, too. I hope that you stay present. I hope you never miss out on the opportunity to speak openly about how you feel. I hope you never take for granted the love you have in your life or the people who never leave your side, no matter how oblivious you are to their feelings. I hope you stop pushing off what you want to do and just dive head first into doing it.

Our time here is limited. Please, please, just don’t miss the point.