I woke up this morning and scanned the world news on my iPhone while I was laying in bed waiting for my body to be ready to move - it’s a bit of a ritual for me once the weather turns cold since I have a titanium plate in my spine and, somehow, my back always takes a few extra minutes to ‘wake up’ between the months of October and March...  Anyway, I generally get little news from the US since I live in the Czech Republic, and I was surprised to read about the death of a terminally-ill woman who had taken her life under a ‘right to die’ law in Washington State.  You can link to the article here , but in essence she made the decision to take her own life based upon the inevitability of a horrible and debilitating death from an aggressive brain cancer.  Before she died, she spent the waning months of her life traveling, exploring and being with her family and close friends in order to squeeze every last moment of quality from her remaining time. 

I felt conflicted on several counts as I read the article - not about her or her actions so much as about the general state of society: the fact that a terminally ill woman has to seek legal protection in order to secure the right to die before her body decays around her is disturbing in itself.  But, I suppose that I was even more struck by the idea that the vast majority of the militantly ‘pro life’ people out there who attempt to assert the views/beliefs and regulations on others aren’t actually living their own lives.  What I mean to say is that if you are so dedicated to a cause (any cause) that it becomes the focal point of your existence, then are you really living your life?  I don’t think that life is just about leaving a mark on the world - it’s got to be about understanding and appreciating and soaking in the people and moments that comprise your world.  If you think about the people who are most revered in history, I believe that very few of them set out with the explicit goal of changing the world (okay, Roman emperors and sociopathic WWII German politicians aside); rather that many of them were simply living life as they saw it and that greatness ‘occurred’ around them.

But, forget politics and ‘changing the world’ stuff for a moment and let’s go back to the story of this woman - just think about the fact that she spent her last days on earth trying to spend every moment as quality time with the people she was close to, learning and doing new things in spite of the futility of her experiences and knowledge amounting to anything long-term.  Now think about your life.  While I was sitting and writing, while you were watching TV or reading, while your kids were playing and people were lying homeless in the subways and wars were being waged in the Middle and Near East, she was taking her life.  I don’t mean it as any kind of statement - just that death is only a seminal event for those who are doing the dying... the same as life.  So, instead of focusing on what you have to do to live, just live - don’t spend all your time making plans, because life isn’t a staged event.  Life is unpredictable and every moment is a lifetime in itself that we can either allow to pass us by or fully experience and revel in...

Sad and bad things happen everyday - sometimes to each of us.  But todays difficulties can never erase the joys of a life well lived.  For me, the only true sadness would come in having nothing to miss when the end draws near...