You feel tired, or lazy, like another hour in bed would be nice, like getting in gear would be more effort than would be comfortable right now.
Don’t waste your life. Live desperately, as if time were limited … because it is. Live urgently. As if each moment counted – because it does. As if this day could be your last – because it could.
Your last opportunity to see the sun’s reflection off a myriad little wonders placed before you.
As if time is running out – because it is. That limited quantity of days, hours, minutes is not unlimited.
Yet there is so much of life to fit into them. Softball games with children – yours or ones you know. Dinners with friends or colleagues. Interesting places at a travel’s reach (a plane flight, train trip or days drive). There lie ahead the explorations of an amazing world, still to be made.
And there is tenderness to be found in the hugs of a child, the touch of a lover, the knowing smile of an octogenarian. All to be packed into the day, into this day.
Whether the headlights catch you off guard, or the diagnosis seems unbelievable, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that one lives a full, jam-packed life, right up until our point of departure. A decade or a day, we do not know that fateful accounting. Yet we do know it has a limit. All we can do – the best we can do – is to live desperately, grabbing each minute of opportunity not yet past, savoring each drop of richness within our temporal and physical reach.
Sleep tempts. Stress presses. Pressures overwhelm. Knowing we have one chance at each day trumps those relentless forces. Don’t let the moment slip past unspent, unappreciated. Live fully. Love urgently.
Live desperately.