Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about these things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a cherry with her thumb and first finger. Get a life in which you are not alone, Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love isnot leisure: it is work. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity.
Work in a Soup Kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. Everyone wants to do well. But if you donot do good too, then doing well will never be enough. It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to exist instead of to live. I learned to live many years ago. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the World and try to give some of it back because I believed in it,
completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: consider the lilies of the field. Eat in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.
