Seize the Day

So here I am - here I was - fully grown-up, married for three decades, children grown and gone but in regular contact, doing a job I find tedious in the extreme to help pay bills and the mortgage which looms over us yet, paddling about in the sea-froth of self-publishing

and I hear that two of my friends have died

One, a past friend, was killed by cancer and as her husband had also died several years before, left their daughter an orphan. The other, a now and future friend, was killed in an accident. I want to say more but can find nothing which isn't a cliche. And after all, the bare facts are enough.

As the aftershock begins to fade, their deaths somehow assimilated, I am looking at the landscape of my own life differently. Another cliche of course, but one with its own imperative. The tedious job is to be ditched, my children and husband to be held close. And dipping my toes in the cold and careless tide feels akin to apathy. I must plunge in, while I can. Suck the marrow out of life.

Thanks, Walt Whitman. Thanks Robin Williams for speaking his poetry so inimitably. And thanks Sam and Val for a lesson in perspective you would never have wanted to give.