On life, love, and other meaningful things…
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 08:26AM 
A dear friend of mine is hurting today. Last night, her father decided that today would be his last. So by the time you read this, he will have probably breathed his last breath. In light of this, I feel inclined to share a few things
First, I ask that you pray for her. I say this without an ounce of irony. I don't want to be trite, political, cheesy, or overbearing, as appeals for prayer generally are, in my opinion. But if you can bring yourself to, please do.
And if you don't share the faith that both she and I do, then please, suspend your disbelief for a brief moment and utter a few words to the god that I know you don't think exists. I imagine that most of you don't, and that's fine. But I ask you to anyway. Because if heard by the God in whom I do believe, then your disbelief won't matter a bit. And if I'm wrong and you're truly just talking to yourself, then chalk it up to a silly, irrational act of kindness done as a favor to me as I feel for my friend. Surely, we've all done stupider things at a friend's request, right?
I also want to share some things that her pain has helped me recognize, in hope that it may resonate with you as well:
She approached me earlier this month and told me that her father was dying, and it was making her consider what and whom she truly valued in this world. Loving our family, our friends, and everyone that we meet is our highest calling in this world, yet we often get distracted and don't live up to our mission.
Like me, she'd left home and enveloped herself in an exciting world. A lifestyle full of fantastic culture, characters, parties, clothes, fun you name it. In living this exciting life, she'd found that it is often very easy to forget what really matters.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to use this to repudiate the liberal, hip, fast-moving twenty-something lifestyle we've come to embrace. Rather, I want to warn others of how it makes it easy to forget what's truly precious and ignore what's divine. Sacrificing greatness for smug self-importance is a miserable thing, yet I do it far more often than I care to admit.
I spend much of my time worrying about what others think about me. I spend just as much time judging others. But neither of these activities has ever created a single meaningful benefit for my self or my soul. The hateful glare that I so often give for things such as appearance, social or political affiliations, musical and cultural preferences, or whatever, is at best a waste of time and at worst a waste of myself.
Sure, looking a certain way is a nice way to indicate what social group you belong to or what kind of music you like or what you like doing with your time. And that's fine. But that doesn't give me good cause to denigrate you and your culture every time that I see you. I may think that you dress horribly, your music is awful, and your political views are downright evil, but for me to use these as reasons to hate you causes the greatest disservice to me.
I may think that you are misguided, are selfish, have bad taste, or are a boring person, but if I use those as reasons to hate you, then my act is much more sinister.
What my friend's pain has done for me is remind me that we are all human. We all have love, hate, joy, and pain. We all care about certain things and we probably don't act like we do, all too often. And when we are honest, we have no idea what we are doing most of the time.
So let me take a minute to say I m sorry and I love you. To my old friends and family whom I've ignored and let fall out of touch, I'm sorry and I love you. To my new ones, to whom I've shown unending flippancy and pretention, I'm sorry and I love you. And to the strangers on the street whom I write off every time I meet, I'm sorry and I love you.
This isn't to say that I'm going to be any less opinionated. I still think everything about dubstep is horrible and that Ayn Rand's ideology is a terribly evil thing. I still think that Dirty 6th is fucking annoying and Olive Garden is disgusting. I still think that I like better food, music, books, bars, and ideas than most people. But that's no reason to be such a shithead about it.
I'm supposed to love you no matter what, and that's what I m going to try to do. I'm going to screw it up, but when I do, please call me on it. Life is clearly too short to get caught up in anything except love, so let's just do that already.
Maybe my friend's pain and my thoughts might seem totally separate to you. That's fine. The connection might be a stretch, but it happened for me. Things happen in mysterious ways, and are controlled by one far cleverer than I am. So I'm going with it. I'll step off my soapbox, hoping that you found some value in what I've written here. If not, for wasting your time with my long-winded, self-absorbed pontification I'm sorry, and I love you.
image used via creative commons from judahm
