Seasons Of Life And Death

There are dead ants on my kitchen counter. They are scouts for the den. They do their job look­ing for food until they die. You would think by now the word would have got­ten back to the queen that I do not cook. Since ants hate diet drinks, you would think they would have given up by now. They live; they do their tasks; they die. The same prin­ci­ple is all around us. Phys­i­cal aging can be slowed a lit­tle through diet, exer­cise, and good mental/spiritual health, but it can­not be stopped. The grave beck­ons us from the day of our birth. The sea­sons remind us of this inevitable fact of life in con­stant slow pat­terns. Each day is a minia­ture life of birth (wak­ing up), our bap­tism (the morn­ing bath), our pro­duc­tive years (mid-day), then the sun­set years (when we dread birth­days and mirrors)…and finally falling asleep (the uni­ver­sal sym­bol for death).

Enjoy the sea­sons of life and death. Each has its beau­ties as well as its chal­lenges. The shad­ows exist for a rea­son too. Some go through life with almost con­stant ill­nesses. Many are poor. Some die sud­denly. A few lose their minds. Need­less wars abound. Inequities in all things are con­tin­ual. Try as you may, you will make but lit­tle dif­fer­ence in the big pic­ture. You help oth­ers as you can, but you turn to your­self to ask for the mean­ing to it all. That is when your life really begins. Once you under­stand the ground rules of this world, you are free to pur­sue all that tran­scends it.

Love is a favorite. Music is sec­ond I sup­pose. The visual world can be breath­tak­ing at times. Noth­ing beats your favorite meal when you are really hun­gry. No two sun­sets are the same. Humor can pull you above the strug­gle pretty quickly (I rec­om­mend it at every turn). Great sto­ries can give you hope in the midst of hope­less­ness. The essences of sto­ries from cen­turies past still speak to our hearts. Clas­sics are some­how eter­nal. There a many rea­sons to live and a few good rea­sons to die. I have cho­sen as my pri­mary focal point the sec­ond of those two because they are paradoxical.

When you are ready to die, then you are ready to fully live. There is no one as mis­er­able as one using this life to fight the inevitable. It is a bat­tle always lost. Accept the end so you can enjoy the mid­dle. Read the last page first if you have to. I can tell you how it ends for every­one, so relax into this one day. Expe­ri­ence it to the fullest. In Jesus’ words “Take no thought for tomorrow…”