Answers
“Life is like a camera. Focus on what’s important. Capture the good times. And if things don’t work out, just take another shot.”– Ziad K. Abdelnour
A young new mother hurriedly dropped off her toddler at daycare, only able to speak for a short minute before she ran off to catch the train. On that ill-fated day, the train crashed. Struggling for life, a bystander comforted her. “Think about your family,” she said. “About your children and your friends. You are loved.” She did her best to hold on, but the pain was too much. She was gone.
While this story made headlines when a New Jersey commuter train crashed into a platform, it’s but one of many other perilous sagas where life is cut too short and our friends or loved ones are taken away due to illnesses, violence, accidents and natural disasters, just to name a few. The point? Life is so precious that rather than allowing the sands of time to slip through our hands, we have to seize the moment.
Yet, we have difficulties with enjoying what we have in the present. We often find ourselves longing for something else, never really savoring what we have right now, in this very moment. And, often, it takes some calamity or major strife for us to realize the fragility of life, and just how precious we all are in the eyes of someone near and dear to our hearts.
It shouldn’t take massive amounts of pain to open our eyes to the beauty of what we have. We tend to allow the miracles that are happening all around us to fall by the wayside as we sit in wallow, immersed in fear, replete with stress and anxiety. No, it shouldn’t work like that. But we all know that it does. We all take this precious life for granted at one point or another in our lives. Yes, all of us.
However, if you’ve landed here, then there’s a reason why you’re reading these words. I believe that everything in life happens for a reason. No matter what it is, there’s a divine purpose. We might not always realize it at the moment, especially when we’re dealing with massive amounts of pain or failure, but there is.
And the simple fact will always remain that no matter what happens — no matter what trials or tribulations you have to dredge through — that life will always be precious. We just have to find the good in every moment, no matter how meek or meager it might seem to us, because everything in life is subjective, gleaned upon by the status quo in our lives.
The problem with that? We don’t look to what we have. Rather, we’re deluged with a flood of thoughts immersed in what we don’t have. We envy others for enjoying success and the fruits of their labors while we live in a tormented state of pity, regret and anger. It bothers us when people around us succeed. It bothers us that our seemingly small problems seem so big.