LIVING SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN

We live with the unknown. We were born sometime in the past and our journey in this life will end sometime in the future. We know when we were born, when the journey began. We do not know when we will die, when the journey will end. Between then and now is filled with the unknown, totally unknown, and that can be and often is disconcerting, very disconcerting.

We live from one moment to the next not knowing what the next moment will bring. We make plans for the day or the week, plans to go out to dinner, take a vacation, go to work or school or whatever and do not know if any of these plans will actually come to fruition, but we make them anyway. We have to. We have no choice. But that is life living somewhere in between birth and death.

Our responsibility is to use the time we have left to the best of our ability, living one day at a time, one moment at a time. And we do without hardly ever thinking about it. It’s what we do as a human being. It’s all we can do and all we are expected to do. That does not mean we do not think about when our life will end or about how it will end. It simply means that we do not think such thoughts until it does seem like our life here on earth is nearing its end.

It also means that we should take time, every once in a while, to examine how we are living our lives in the somewhere in between time we have been given by God. What have we learned from our past life: our mistakes and failures, our successes and triumphs? We can’t do-overs or un-does. We can only learn from them and try in the time to come not to do what we should not do and do what we should do. Just doing that can often be difficult enough given our human proclivity of not learning from our mistakes as well or as often as we should.

The truth is that living in the in between times is really an adventure for which the past has been a prelude and a teaching and learning experience, or at least it should have been. And like all adventures it will have its ups and downs, failures and successes. But it will only be an adventure if we understand it as one. That does not mean that very day is going to be exciting or even uplifting. It does mean that we look forward to the day wondering what that day will bring and living it as fully and faithfully as we can.

That is all we can do of course. As we grow older our body limits what we can do even as our mind tries to convince us that we can do what we did twenty years ago. And when we tried to act twenty years younger, our body lets us know what a fool we were. Pain, probably fortunately, is sometimes the only way we seem to learn.

The truth is that living in between birth and death is a gift we have been given. How we use that gift is up to us.