"Live like you are dying."
"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today."
"Carpe diem."
We have all had these sayings thrown at us countless times, whether painted in the form of wall art, through fortune cookies or carved into the wet sand of beaches. And, countless times, we choose not to see through the cliché of these words and to simply brush them off as cheesy and overused.
I am admittedly guilty of this, but you and I both need to stop looking at these words as simply clichés and start acknowledging the absolute truth behind them.
Three times in the past year alone, I have been personally touched by the stomach-aching deaths of boys incredibly too young to pass on. 19, 20, and 23 years old. Without a wedding, without children, without grandchildren, and without doing all of the things that at one point they had overwhelming dreams of doing; their time is up.
The most frustrating aspect of time, at least in my opinion, is the completely ambiguous nature of it. Plain and simply, we have absolutely no control of it and no idea of when it might expire for each of us, individually.
So, I am posing this question for you: if you were only given one more day, what would you do with it?
Some may see this as a roughly morbid way of thinking, but whether or not you may agree with this mindset, we should all make the conscious decision to live in this manner.
The honest truth is that we genuinely have no idea when that moment will come for each of us to pass on; so with that question, I am asking if your already finite time was harshly shortened, would that change your way of living? Would that change the mindset that you woke with every morning?
Who would you tell more that you love them? What chances would you take?
You can easily brush my words off as nothing you have not heard before, but I am wholeheartedly asking you not to do so and to honestly take to heart the advice that I am laying out before you. It may seem easy to ignore if you have not personally known someone that has been taken too young because it is easy to think the that it will never be you. But you simply do not know.
This is not an invitation to live foolishly and carelessly, but rather a small reminder to not take for granted the gravity of each day that is gifted to you.
So close this article, shut your computer or turn off your phone, and go live. Live for those whose chances and whose futures have been stolen from them. Live for the dreams, the people, the adventures that you want to have. Live for yourself.
