“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”
This is so true that it is frightening. It is true of many men, and it has all too often, I am sorry to say, been true of me. So many people, from their youngest days, go through life expecting that someday their life is going to start, and great and extraordinary things will happen to them. And they pass through life, merely existing, because they are expecting it to start at some undefined point in the future. They are not living life, because they see what they have done in the past and are doing now as some kind of prologue, or perhaps even less than a prologue — an introduction, or a foreword perhaps. And these poor damned souls, when they get to the end of their four-score years and ten, they think to themselves “Wait, wait, I can’t die now. I haven’t had a chance to really live. My life hasn’t started yet.”
And there is Death himself, shaking his head at their stupidity; even he, with uncounted centuries of experience dealing with the dying, cannot laugh at this. “Your life hasn’t started yet, you idiot?” he says to them. “What do you call the last ninety years you’ve had on this planet? It’s not my fault if you didn’t have the guts to grab the brass ring, or the wits to make something of the cards that life dealt you. No, your life started long ago. It’s not my fault if you were asleep at the wheel.”
I haven’t mastered this, yet, or figured it out. I’m not sure I ever will completely. But I know this much: I do not want to spend another moment in that haze, that dream-state of those who go through life merely existing and never really living, never really feeling. I want to live out the rest of my four-score years and ten, and more if I am lucky enough to live so long; and when I go to my reward, I want to be able to say “I was awake, and I really sucked that lemon.” I want to go to my grave full of memories, and with the sense that I made something of my life. It doesn’t have to be anything grand, or anything that would make me famous, but it does have to satisfy at least one person: me.
