This past week, borders were blurred as North Americans set aside their differences for the day and remembered September 11 and those who lost their lives in the tragedy. I can’t watch the footage anymore. Now that I have a child, it somehow hits a part of me that didn’t exist when I was young and single and full of shock and horror. When I lacked that intense tie to another. When I understood, but didn’t really understand.
So I avoid the television, but I remember in my own way. I read tributes and I pause and think and I try to appreciate my family and friends a little more deeply. It’s so easy to forget what can be wiped out in a minute.
And I don’t just mean loved ones.
This year, a new perspective moved me. One line, written by a woman who was supposed to be in the World Trade Center that day but wasn’t. She mourned and reflected and asked, ?And I wonder: am I living a life that deserves that chance I got 10 years ago??
And That’s when I realized. Every single day, I’m given that same chance. And I don’t quite know what my answer would be.
We don’t like to think about death. We hear the news during our commute or we check out the headlines online, but there’s a disconnect. It’s stories, like something created in Hollywood. Sad, tragic, but so far removed that we don’t really think it can happen to us.
It can. It does.
But here’s the thing: it didn’t today.
And so I ask myself: Am I living a life that gives credit to the gift I receive each day? Do I show gratitude not by saying ?I’m thankful? but by living thankfully? By using the gift of life in a beautiful manner rather than tossing it in the corner, dragging it through the muck, leaving it out in the rain to rot?
we’re told to live each day as though it were our last. But we should be living each day as though it were our first. Full of wonder and gratitude. Full of enthusiasm and potential. Full of hope.
So how am I living? I don’t know how to answer that question. I don’t know whether I ever will. But what I do know is that I’ll never stop asking it. And maybe It’s in the act of looking for that answer that I’ll someday find it.
