Six Feet Under

Many times, when I post here, I've thought about what I want to say and, sometimes, how I want to say it. Others -- obviously -- I haven't. This is somewhere in between.

I just finished watching the series finale of Six Feet Under. I quit watching it for a while because I found it too depressing, but for some reason, this season, I missed only one episode. If you watch it, then you know how it all ended. If you didn't, the very short version is, in the end, they all die. The entire Fisher family, one by one, in the future, at their given moment in time. And there was something simultaneously heartbreaking and life-affirming about those deaths playing out against the backdrop of Claire driving away from home to start her own life.

It should go without saying: Life is short.

Sometimes we forget. Often, I do.

I was talking with my boss a week or so ago about marriage and family and life and time. He asked how old I was and I told him I will be 35 in September. I'm not happy about it, and I told him that, too. He said, "You've got a good 35 years to go."

I didn't like his answer. It didn't sound like much time. I'm terrified of time passing.

And yet, I live almost exclusively in a regretted past and an imagined future; rarely in the now. Maybe that's because the times that I decide to forget about things that have gone wrong before or worry about what could go wrong in the future and just go forward anyway, I've gotten burned. But (as I mentioned in my Grand Gesture post) aren't there worse things than getting burned?

That may sound like I think we should live in Grand Gestures, and perhaps I gave that impression in the earlier post (or even in the sentence above). If so, I'm amending it here. Respect the fact that today even exists enough not to waste gestures -- grand or otherwise -- on anyone or anything that isn't worth it. Take chances on people, sure. Give people second chances, the benefit of the doubt. But don't give them everything. Don't give them your power. Especially when they've done nothing to prove themselves worthy; especially when they do the opposite. Today is it. This is all we're guaranteed, and we aren't even guaranteed the whole day. This minute. Right now.

Eradicate the unnecessary. Embrace those who are willing to be embraced, and willing to embrace in return. And if you are one of the unembraceable, you have a choice: Give up the act; allow yourself to be vulnerable; let someone in.

Or not.

I have been in an increasingly deepening valley lately with these tiny spikes in-between. I'm tired of it. Those of you who are around me daily are probably tired of it too. I can't promise I'll wake up tomorrow ready to take it all on, but I hope that I will. I hope I'll respond to the challenges that face me tomorrow as I just did the bottle of sesame seeds I knocked from the counter moments ago leaving me with glass and sesame seeds everywhere -- right after I'd cleaned the whole kitchen.

I cleaned it up.

I moved on.