One of those moments in life happened today. One of those moments where you step back from life, in an almost ethereal sense, and take stock of everything going on around you.
Death.
Nothing pauses a human more than death and the thoughts that it brings. It’s a definite end. A period mark with no sentence following.
A friend, a teammate, somebody I hadn’t talked to in years but once considered a friend, decided to end his own life. It’s the first time I’ve had to hear and deal with someone my age passing away.
It really jolts the system, regardless of how long its been since any communication with that person.
I will never judge another person for their life choices- we all have our separate roads to walk. Sometimes those roads cross, sometimes they stay parallel and we wish there would be a cross point, some are on opposite sides of the city. We may have an idea of what that other person’s road looks like, but in reality, we haven’t the slightest clue how they see it. Our bed of roses could be someone elses bed of thorns. He made a decisive choice that has no return point. His road dead ended, never to be paved again. Right, wrong, or indifferent, that is absolute truth. I wish his life would have blossomed into whatever happiness he desired, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Regardless, I hope he may rest in peace.
I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the thought of suicide. I don’t know if its that I’m hard-wired differently or what, its just never made concrete sense to me. Not at a young age. The only time I’ve understood is in the case of Hunter Thompson. He went out like a true man- he lived the life he wanted, by his own terms, and when life took those terms away from him, he ended the game. What a way to live- keeping that control that everybody so desperately seeks, even to the bitter end.
I know I’m still young, and its still a foreign concept and that I have a lot to learn, but the mere thought of death scares the hell out of me. It always has, but for the simplest reasons.
I’m so enamored with what this world, what my road has to offer, that I want to keep traveling to see where it takes me next. Good, bad, ugly, ridiculously amazing, it’s a ride that has kept me on the edge of my seat.
I’ve always thought people saw life the same way, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that that just isn’t the case. Too many people get mired in the details and allow the down time to sandbag them, to suck them in like quicksand.
If you’re one of those people, here’s a quick piece of advice- it always gets better.
I know its cliché, but its honest truth. Life is cyclical. Any religion will teach the same thing- you’re born, you live, you die, you participate in some form of rebirth. Even atheists believe in the cycle of life- they live, die, and their remains feed the Earth and the Earth will always grow.
Life is exactly the same way. You’ll peak at the highest highs, and stumble through the lowest lows, but you’re never stuck at one point. That’s the beauty of life- its so inconceivably complicated that you’ll never be stuck at one point. Something will always come around to change things up; maybe not as soon as one may like it to, but something always happens.
That’s what makes me love life. Its like the best movie you’ve ever seen. Being a bit of a movie fan, the movies that inspire me are the ones where I can’t guess what will happen next- the ones that deviate from the norm, the ones that create conflict out of minute detail versus the ones that follow the common form of characters-conflict-resolution-denouement-open door for sequel. Life is the best movie or story you’ll ever have knowledge of because you can never tell what’s happening next.
That’s the way I’ve always seen it. Maybe its because I’ve always been interested in movies and writing, that viewpoint always made sense to me. Like I said, everybody’s road is different, so everybody will see it in their own way.
In this situation, I just wish I could have given him my rose colored glasses to take one last look at his road before he decided to stop paving.
