The sun sets on another day…
I watched sunrise and sunset from the car today as I drove to and from a small event. It was not the size of the event that mattered but instead the people that were there. People that were comfortable with themselves and comfortable with me. As I watched the sky I was amazed at the colors. It will help me remember this day for a long time.
Don’t whine about your past, it is gone. Instead embrace it as a way to grow and perhaps a way to enjoy your days. Don’t pine about the future, it isn’t here. Instead consider the future as a series of moments that will be written by your present. The past is gone, the future is not here, we define ourselves every day and to honor both.
I think this is the toughest lesson for people to learn. A story for you. I’ve told it before, but it started a new line of thinking for me. My mother and father were divorced when I was six. This started a journey for me that was without a father. Of course, there were things that happened, and my mother eventually married after a very large number of suitors. My stepfather was an interesting man. I got along with him just fine but established early on that he was not my father. My little sister knew no better so she eventually considered him her father without even knowing for real father. There was a period of time, and I did not see my father at all, and it was long. As a child I never understood this and as I became a teenager, I understood it even less. I excelled in a lot of things but never had a father to excel with. I saw in movies or television the father’s playing ball with their sons, and I never experienced that. I played football and no one was in the stands, and it really didn’t matter because up until I was 15 I never started at the same school twice.
When I was 16 my father came to see me. At that point, since the time that I was six, I had seen him four times instigated by my grandparents who stopped by a mall that he worked at and pretty much forced him to have lunch with my sister and I. Occasionally I had gotten Christmas cards, sometimes even birthday cards. I never counted on them because often they didn’t come.
This may seem depressing, but i didn’t know any different and I was lost in writing, or in schoolwork. I had some friends but usually I was gone before I made any good friends, and probably didn’t have a real friend until I was 15. I read books, I played with Legos, I designed silly stuff like lasers and circuits that I thought would someday change the world. My sister and I survived, not because we were better or worse than anyone else, but instead because we had learned to be resilient.
I promise I’m getting to a point.
After I met my father when I was 16, I started spending a little more time with him. I was not part of his life consistently, but I was part of his life. We discussed the past a little and he avoided most of it. There was no social media or any way to see what he had done, and I learned bits and pieces of his life without me and my sister. I stood in his wedding when I was 18, he helped me immeasurably when I got married at 23 and so it went. He wanted to be part of my life and saw my children occasionally, but we lived a great distance away. I tried to be a part of what he did and saw him go through some difficult times. He finally retired and bought a bed and breakfast and refurbished it to make it a very good destination.
He spent a lot of time making the bed and breakfast nearly perfect. Walls were redone and he pushed to make everything as fantastic as he could. After the first year he began having a trim a tree on the Saturday after Thanksgiving every year. There were dozens of trees in the house to be decorated NT donated money for the decorations to the Salvation Army. He dressed up well and spent time talking to everyone who came. The Thanksgiving day celebration became a yearly thing where everyone in the Smith family met and I finally got to know some of my relatives that were long since vapour.
I was 41 when he called me and we talked about taking a motorcycle trip together. It’s kind of funny that most of the people in his life had gone on trips with him, but not me. His stepson, my cousins and many more went on trips but I was not invited. It was a Sunday when he called and on that Sunday he said he realized that we needed to do something together. I had been riding motorcycles for a long time and he still had one and we were going to take a trip to Missouri together. As I said that was on a Sunday, on Thursday I got the phone call that he had died.
He had talked consistently about how he was going to do many different things and instead he paid attention to other things with those dreaded words, “we’ll do it tomorrow”. After that Thursday there were no more tomorrow’s. My memories were tight of who he was but there were many things missing. Some were very difficult. I realized that he consistently put off everything in favor of it happening tomorrow.
I know it was a long story. The reason I tell this story is because he always thought he had time and it was all taken away in an instant. I began considering this a lot and started realizing that living in today was the only way to ensure that you had a good life. Of course you have to consider the past, mostly because you didn’t want to repeat your mistakes. Of course you had to consider the future, because tomorrow comes all too fast. I started realizing though that much of what I saw in ads and on television drove us in circles. We planned for retirement and for trips that might never come, we live to serve others and to be that person who constantly and consistently did good work.
I have never seen a tombstone that said “they were a good worker” but instead saw descriptions of good fathers, good friends, and good stewards. I read books by the hundreds on how to live life then some of them directly contradicted each other, but many had a common theme which was to squeeze the life out of every day.
I know you’re tired of me rattling on like a busted chainsaw, so i’ll get to the point.
Define yourself every day as the best person you can be in that day. Push constantly for more and never put off those things that you could get done that make a difference to your life right now. Those last two words “right now” our key determiner as each day it may change and the focus of your life may constantly shift, maybe even turning completely around. But in the end be the best you can be for that day while remembering the past but never whining about it and considering the future but never waiting for it.
So as the sun sets on another day, I think I went overboard. I think about my dad from time to time and all the good times that we had. There will never be enough but I have no way of changing it so it doesn’t matter. He wanted to squeeze every moment out of life but lost so much because he wasn’t sure when tomorrow would come. Don’t count on tomorrow, count on today. Live your life boldly and make every day the best day for you that you can, and bring a few people along with you if you have the ability to. I will keep believing in this and in you, always, no matter what.
Sleep sweet, love life, and define you….