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We all know in our minds that life is transient. It is fleeting. One minute I was playing with my dolls, and it seems the next, I was playing with my kids. Thirty years of my life had gone by. I thought the diaper and bottle stage would never end, and the next thing I knew, I was teaching them how to drive. I was beginning to get the idea that life was brief, and temporary. I wanted to hold onto my kids, they, of course, had other plans. My two oldest are on their own, and my baby, the one drinking the sippee cup, was seventeen yesterday.
No more toys covering the family room floor on Christmas morning. No more teenagers coming in and out with their friends. That time is past. I barely had enough time to enjoy it. Next month, my youngest will get their license. One day, he'll be moving out on his own, too. Only now, I am more aware of how fast the time will fly by until that happens. It's a split second in time, and twenty three years has gone by since I was pregnant with my first child.
When we are growing up, we can't wait to be thirteen. A teenager, our first milestone. Then we try to speed up time until we are seventeen and can drive. The next thing we know, we're getting married and having kids, and writing about how they are now on their own. I am also waiting to be a grandmother, yet another phase of this passing and temporary life. I have to remember to enjoy all I can.
We need to be like vacuums, sucking up every second. It all gets away from us so fast. Then, of course, there are all the trials and tribulations going on while we're trying to enjoy our lives, as each day slips away.
It's hard not to let the bad times overshadow the good. We need to focus on letting go of so much pettiness, and using that time and energy to live. We don't, of course, but we need to if we want to get as much as we can from our brief stay on this Earth.
I believe we sometimes confuse our life span with the fact that the real birth comes when we pass away, and become our spirit selves, watching and guiding whomever we've left behind. I know we don't usually think of it that way, but I believe more and more the older I get, that this is, indeed, the way it is. If the afterlife is eternal, then this journey is but a second in time. We may have been physically born, but that ends in less than a hundred years, and then, we on Earth say we die. Doesn't it make more sense that we are born?
If we could really live according to this belief, I think we would let the small things go easier, we'd argue less, we'd love more, and we'd appreciate all that has been offered to us. This time on Earth is to learn. We're in school, and when we pass away, we will have graduated this segment of our progressive journey. I would think that if we are fighting and complaining and manipulating and lying, we are wasting what precious time we have to enjoy our gifts, until we finish our course.
The trouble is, there are things that do get us upset, and sometimes, there's not much we can do about it but go with it, and try not to waste too much time obsessing on them.
An infant with an earache in the middle of the night, screaming until you can get to the doctor's, is hard to smile and laugh about. Three kids all fighting at once while you try to calm them down, is not something you can stop in the middle of and say, "Gee, I love this day." However, we can learn to be more aware that coping with life's rocks that it throws at us, can be done in a way that doesn't take too much time away from the positives that surround us. We need to be aware of the fleeting moment we are here on this Earth until we are born into Eternity, and try and make the very best of it.
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