This is *your* time -- how will you use it?

Do you ever think about all the people that lived before you were even born?

Have you ever looked at old family photograph or antique portrait, taken back when photography meant 8x10 cameras on tripods with long bellows and and a blackout cloth?

Did you looked closely at their faces?  Perhaps you noticed a sparkle in their eyes -- the spark of their consciousness recorded in those photos?

As a teacher of mine once said he used to love to view such old photographs, even of total strangers, because it would remind him:  "that was *their* time ... now this is *my* time."

And this is also *your* time.

For the people in those old photographs, that spark is now extinguished.

But yours is burning as long as you are alive.  How brightly it burns is largely up to you.

The Summer Day 

—Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Day 34: Creeping closer

Creeping ivy, Pickity Place, Mason, NH, March 2008,

Nikon D40, 35mm focal length equiv. 300mm, Exposure 1/30 sec @ f5.6, ISO 400, no flash, exposure bias -1/3

© Steven Crisp [Click on the photo to enlarge]

See this ivy?  It keeps creeping forward, step by step, day by day.

Your life is like that as well.  So is your death.  It's something few people like to think about -- someday in the future, we will live our last day.

And we don't get to know when this will happen.  Which for most of us, allows us to forget about it entirely.  But that's not the best approach.

What if you really realized you were going to die -- would it affect the way you live today?  I think so.  And that's a good thing, because it is too easy for each of us to take our lives, our health, our financial security for granted.  We need to recognize just how lucky we are, and take steps to make the most of this one and only life -- this gift -- that we have.

I expect you've heard about Dr. Randy Pausch.  Now there was a classy guy, who really made a difference in the lives of his students, and now many others that have seen his "last lecture" and/or read his book.

Once again, today's post comes from the donation, which was made to Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, to search for a cure for the disease that Dr. Pausch battled.  Through some e-mails today, I came across his lecture and just had to watch it again.  Along with a special by Diane Sawyer (find it here, down the page on the left side).  He was quite a man.

His last lecture is an hour-long.  If you've never seen it, you are in for a real treat.  And if you did see it when it came around the web the first time (it's now had over 12 million views), you still might want to take the time to be reminded of his noble lessons for life.

Don't let that ivy creep up on you.  Decide what actions you want to take, and live your dreams.

• Donation:  Pancreatic Cancer Action Network in honor of Dr. Randy Pausch
• Exercise:  Walking around Den Haag city center (15 mins) -- hey, we took the tram because it was cold ;-)

The Art of Drowning

Dawn clouds, Tucker Pond, Salisbury, NH, July 2003, Sony Cybershot, Exposure 1/80 sec @ f2.8, ISO 100, no flash © Steven Crisp [Click on the photo to enlarge]

A good friend sent me a poem by this author (who served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate), and as it always does, one thing led to another, and here is one of his that caught my eye.

Right now, my daughter and I are getting our scuba diving certificates -- so perhaps you see the connection ;-) Anyways, without further ado:

The Art Of Drowning, by Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

Yes indeed.

No visit to the pearly gate;
no judgment meted out by an over-worked apostle;
no flash of insight to help guide your baby-choosing adventure on the next merry-go-round.
Just the “high travel of clouds” overhead.

Let us not forget that while we are still breathing.