Angie Miner

When you were just a child, what did you dream of?  Do you remember how you saw the world?  Do you still carry the memory of how you envisioned yourself?  What career held your passion when you were still so young and the whole world was possible.  What image pressed your mind when the words “to be” raced through your ears for the future path you could choose?  What sparked that happy smile when you thought of an ending to the phrase “I am ______”?  Perhaps you pictured yourself as a doctor, an astronaut, a fireman, or a policeman.  Maybe you wanted to paint beautiful pictures, explore the wonders of the world, protect your country, or find cures to deadly diseases.  Whatever passion it was that called your heart, do you remember why?  What was it about this particular path in life that made you so dearly desire it?  This aspect of what you could give or gain, could it be fulfilled by your dreamed-of life?  Did you want to help people, be famous, or just live your life as wild and free as possible?  Do you remember who you idolized as a child?  What person or figure led a life that you found fascinating?   Which aspects of this life were the ones that so entranced your mind and spurred the beat of your heart? 

Do you remember this path your heart desired as a child?  Do you follow it today or still yearn for it deep in some repressed area of your soul?  Where did life take you?  Perhaps as your mind grew, pieces of the outside world fell upon you to break your dreams with the sickle words of ‘impossible’, ‘unrealistic’, and ‘impractical’.  Then during the years of confusion and eminent choosing, you decided whether these words would break you with their clouded foreshadowing, or build you as you pitted yourself against their pessimistic taunts to test the strength of your own resolve.  You see the twists and turns of the path your feet have made and here you stand at a result of it all, for better or for worse.  

As you take in the surroundings of where you are, of who you are, what do you see?  Did you become the person you had wanted to be?  Are you now a person you want to be?  If the ever so imminent death was standing at your door, ready to knock and call you away this very night, could you leave with satisfaction knowing that you lived in the best way that you could?  Could you be happy knowing that you have been given the gift of a life that lasted for all the years that you have walked this earth, with the opportunity to impact in some great or small way everything that you touched?  Did you learn what is truly important in life?  Do you feel the richness of love, the happiness in unconditional friendships, the purpose in belief, the wonder of the natural world, the joy of giving, and the rightness of doing what is just?  Have you yet discovered the emptiness of money, the curse of materialism, the ache of greed, and the pain of hatred?  Are you satisfied with the way you spent your fleeting and fragile life?  Or, when you open that door and find that you stand at the end of your existence, will you fall to your knees and cry out in grief as you realize that your opportunity has passed and you have wasted it all.  Will you accept with humbleness that you can live no more to do and change and be upon this earth, or will you plead and beg for just a little more time to go back and set things right, perhaps to live for just a few short days as the person you always promised yourself you would be. 

But perhaps luck is still with you and on this night death chooses to pass by your door to knock upon another.  Maybe your time to live in this world will continue for another day, a week, a year, several decades, there’s really no way to know.  But this moment you do know.  This time now you do have and every second of your life is a choice.  What will you do and say in these every seconds to come?  Have you truly yet lived or are you still waiting for some distant day to awaken from the coma of the everyday life you still dwell in.  This is your life, are you who you want to be?