Living For Every Moment

Earlier this week, a young man in my community died suddenly. He left behind a wife, a mother, and brothers. His father tragically died 11 years earlier. A very sad and tragic story, and one that's difficult to find meaning in. But here's my attempt.

When you break it down, life is a sequence of moments. And we string moments together to create a narrative; of our day, our week, our year. In the narrative, we tend to leave out the time in between the moments. They're only placeholders, enabling us to get from Point A to Point B. Perhaps, one can assume, the "placeholder" is intrinsically worthless. I say that a tragedy, the death of a young man, a crane collapsing on a city block, a terrorist attack, should be the wakeup call to destroy the assumption of the "worthless placeholder."

Time is our greatest asset. It's what we never seem to have enough of, and passes us by too fast. Why is that? Because we devalue the in between time. The subway ride, the walk to work, the waiting for a friend to arrive. When we become cognizant of the reality that our time can be taken away from us at a moment's notice, then we should revalue the downtime. Make use of it. Make it into a moment.

How does one make wasted time into useful time? Think. Use the brain. Contemplate. Today its hard to think. We're distracted by our cell phone or our ipod. Start thinking. About what? Our life. Our family. What we can do for someone. What did someone do for us. Try and find a deeper meaning in our actions and relationships. Thinking can transform a minor moment and make it greater.

When tragedy strikes, it is a wakeup call. How can we improve ourselves? Our relationships with our spouses? Our children? Our parents, our siblings, our friends? How can we make better use of our time? Taking a tragedy, and using it as a springboard for improvement, will motivate us to become better people, which in reality, is a great tribute to the one who tragically, is no longer with us.