the things we get to do (or living life to its fullest)

Had a late start the other day and I’ve realized that sometimes our complicated and messy is an opportunity for redemption. Not necessarily for us, but for the stories we keep from those around us. Life is not about doing all the right things, but about being brave when things do not make sense or turn the way we don’t expect it to. 

I was talking to a friend last week, and I never thought I would utter the words “I wish we had more time,” to describe relationships I’ve had with people in the past few years, but perhaps that’s it? We don’t know what we have until things change and the life that was is no longer the life that is, or the life once imagined. The friend who I would go to brunch with on Saturdays is now married, living a life I had always imagined for him in happiness with his new bride. The friend who has always looked out for me when things got hard is now a slightly sleep deprived father of one proudly showing up for his family. The friend who I thought would be there forever is now a stranger because of a conscious decision we made many years ago, and people who mirror any semblance of them, become echo chambers of unresolved grief.

A card from Australia came one morning a few weeks ago and had me both nearly laughing and crying at my bus stop. Caroline is never one for deep feelings so I was surprised at the sappiness, but there was a line in her card about how no matter where we find one another in this world, we will always do what we can to show up for each other because we’ve both become better for it. That the happiness and gratitude we have for life, is perhaps the encouragement we have given one other through friendship and authentic whining at life’s maladies. Perhaps that is the secret ingredient in the secret sauce of life? People who you can show up as you are with, who will likely laugh at your own stupidity with you, but remind you that you are loved through it all, and that you are not as stupid as you may seem.

We only have finite moments in this singular life with each other. There will be roads and doors closed to us because of past mistakes and fumbles we could neither predict or hope for. We will abjectly fail at things and run away from embarrassments to last a lifetime, but a life without falling deep into failure is a life lived without the courage to try. Often times the things unsaid and not done, speak louder in volumes of what could ever be expressed in word or action. To live life authentically is to live life in love and with love at what we get to do. Love is special in a sense that it transforms when we feed its embers with authenticity and unbridled generosity. Sometimes love is the fingerprint blemish on our lives, that remind us of people who no longer remain, but with whom, we owe our lives to deeper than we could ever imagine.