I like the colors – browns and pinks, and the patterned paper, while you probably can’t tell from the photo, is glittery…and I like that too. It’s a cute, simple, perfect little card…except for one thing. It was never sent. It was supposed to go to my friend Vicki for her birthday last year (March 31st), along with a couple of things that I’d made for her. I was several weeks late getting it boxed up and then for some inexplicable reason it just sat there. She had been on a cruise with her son and daughter-in-law but when she got back the cancer, which she’d been fighting for a couple of years, really accelerated and she got worse and worse.
She’s gone now, and she never did read the card or get to enjoy the gifts. Harriet Beecher Stowe once said: "The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds undone." And you all know the stories about words you didn’t say or things you didn’t do and so missed some opportunity… We all get those types of “forwards” from people…people just trying to stay in touch in some way. Most of the time I delete them (because of that “Cries At The Drop Of A Hat” thingee) for they usually remind me of the things I don’t do, the words I don’t say. And if you really think about it, it’s foolish. Out of twenty-four hours surely there is a moment here and there that can be spent towards doing those things and saying those words.
Today I’m going to take that moment out of those twenty-four hours, and with tomorrow’s brand-new twenty-four I’ll do it again. (Cue the soap opera music from “Days of Our Lives” - - “Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives…”) I checked some life expectancy tables (shockingly the U.S. comes in 36th world-wide! behind Cuba for heck sake!!) and for an American citizen the average age reached is 78.3 (I’ll round that off to 78). I’m horrible at math, but I fortunately do have a calculator…so…seventy-eight years equals 28,470 days and 683,280 hours and 40,996,800 minutes. I don’t know about you, but I waste so many of those almost forty-one million minutes. Would I waste forty-one million dollars??? Don’t think so. And yet minutes spent touching someone’s life cannot be measured in dollars or cents…they are incalculable. We never know when one of those moments will change someone’s life forever.
Oh, such wise words! I am a TERRIBLE time waster, spending hour after hour on my laptop, finding by the end of the day I really haven't accomplished anything, subscribing to the Scarlett O'Hara school of thought ("after all, tomorrow is another day") to assuage my guilt. *sigh*
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