Random acts

It's been a difficult couple of weeks. It seems things I thought were right or true or lasting, have not turned out that way. Two friends lost spouses. Both have young children. Both spouses died too soon. Both left questions about what it means to live your life to the fullest. Each day. To understand that we may not have tomorrow.
Because sometimes what we thought was steady is not so. Sometimes the ground moves beneath our feet and all we can do is fall to our knees and hold on.

Our lives are made up of moments. Some of them random- senseless- tragic. A driver on a cell phone kills a mother of two. A father with a wife and 2 daughters at home goes out to walk the dog, has a heart attack, and never comes home. We reach out to each other to hold on, to understand we may not be able to make sense of it all but maybe we’re not supposed to. Maybe we’re just supposed to have faith and believe in something greater than ourselves.

Easier said than done. Some circumstances can have no reason. Mothers and fathers, dying too young. Never getting to say goodbye. And it’s the lives left behind that we cry for. Children too young to understand, too young to comfort. Spouses left to pick up the pieces for themselves and their children. There are no answers.

I want to believe that everything has a reason, that things are meant to be, that there is something more, something that I just can't see, can't understand. And yet, what could be understood from such tragedy? What reason can there be to explain such sadness? There is none. There is only us. Left to talk, left to cry, left to hold each other. All we have are the people we surround ourselves with, and the moments in our lives - some subtle, some grandiose, some tragic, some unbelievably beautiful. We are left to take them all in. To look at them. To appreciate them when they arrive, to bid them farewell as they leave. To live each day fully, completely, not as our last, but as one of many, in a long line of days before and days to follow.

After all, this is the life.
-a

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