I had a blog that I’d been planning to write, but things changed unexpectedly and I ended up with other stuff on my mind. Earlier this week, I learned that a friend of mine was killed in a very tragic motorcycle accident. This made me think about how short life really is, particularly on the heels of an incident that occurred on Saturday while I was driving.
On Saturday, as Abby and I were coming back from visiting mom, in East Tennessee on I-40, I was in the left lane preparing for the split to I-81. I was passing a white pickup truck on my right that was pulling a trailer full of lawn equipment. All of a sudden, the truck began coming over to my lane – the left lane. At first, I thought he was just kind of riding the line, but then I realized he kept coming closer to our car. By now, I was beginning to go into the left-hand emergency lane, so I hit the horn but instead of getting back in his lane, he kept coming so I had to break hard and was able to avoid a wreck by simultaneously pulling my car all the way into the left emergency lane. It scared the bejesus out of me. I was able to get right back on the road so I caught up to the truck and trailer, so Abby could get a picture of the tag and the sign on the trailer. If I had not seen him, we would have been pushed into the dividing wall between eastbound and westbound traffic. I called the number on the trailer then, but of course, he hung up on me. I went on Yelp that evening, found the business name, and learned that apparently, this dude has a habit of driving like this based on the reviews I read. Of course, I left mine, along with the picture Abby took, and fortunately nothing happened to us.
On Monday afternoon shortly after I pulled into our garage I got a text message that told me about Nick. My first reaction was just to scream. You see, I met Nick when he started at the Sheriff’s Office. Grubby was his FTO (Field Training Officer, for my non-law enforcement friends). When Grubby died, he was one of the few that was still in touch a few weeks later. Nick would ask if I needed any help with anything, and he took care of little things around the house. Eventually, he became my yard man and landscaper. Nick always had a kind word and a smile; he always asked about Abby, and we talked about his daughter Haileigh some. He was a true friend, and I’m going to miss him around here.
That really shook me up and made me think about how short life really is. None of us know for sure when our time will come, but we do know it will come. It’s up to us what we do with the time we spend on this earth. I prefer to spend mine with the people that I love doing the things that I love and finding joy in the day-to-day. I sometimes get frustrated because I feel like I’m stuck in Virginia, when I really want to sell the house and move to Daytona, but I know that everything happens in its own time and I don’t control that time. All I can do is control my frustration with how slow bureaucracy sometimes moves.
When I look at life today, I realize that I’ve lived over half of mine and I get to thinking about whether or not I really live it. Well, that brings me back to this blog and how it got its name. In ancient Greece when someone died, only one question was ever asked about them: Did he or she have passion while they were here? When I started this blog, I was in the throes of grief. I definitely wasn’t living with passion. Hell, for that matter, I was barely living at all! But I knew I wanted to, I knew how, and I knew I had to. After a lot of work, and healing, I finally have begun to feel as though I am once again living with passion. That living may not always be perfect, it may not always look good, but it’s always life and it’s always real. Face it, sometimes I am a hot Southern mess, but even when I am, I try to be a passionate hot Southern mess! I don’t have time to stop and look for things be upset about. I don’t have time to not dedicate myself to those I love.
Living with passion, to me, is about possessing a certain joie de vivre. It’s about loving life for the sake of loving life, even when sometimes, life kicks us in the teeth. It’s about finding joy in the little things, not just in the big ones. It’s about being fully present in life at any given moment. It’s about not being afraid to try new things, or to break out of a mold and unapologetically be the person I want to be, not the person the world expects me to be. It’s about finding the magic in life. Grubby was like that. Dad was like that. Nick was like that too.
Over the past couple of years, I feel like I have been more authentically myself than ever before. I can’t pinpoint when I started to feel that lightness of being again, but today, I feel good in my skin, and I love to smile, and those smiles come from somewhere deep within. I can be my silly, goofy self – one who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks about me, cusses like a Sailor (oh wait!), has the sense of humor of a 12-year-old (anyone have a straw handy?), sounds like a barnyard when I laugh, wears a light up cape just because, and keeps my hair blue because I happen to love it. I can be excited about the future, even when I have no clue what it will bring. I am looking forward to my next chapter, whenever it begins, and I am here for it… all of it.
Life is a gift, and I always like it when I get a good gift. If you’ll excuse me now, I am going to grab a straw and go play in a blanket fort!
