If you haven't looked today, you need to check out Going Like Sixty. He has a very funny piece about daylight savings time there, but I'll go ahead and give you the gist of it: instead of taking an hour from Saturday/Sunday, let's take an hour from Friday afternoon. I like it! Everyone's always in such hurry to get to the weekend away from work and job pressures. Why not cut the time from that part of the clock instead of the weekend?
And then my next email was from a friend. This friend learned a couple of weeks ago that she has a brain tumor. It is malignant and they will take very aggressive steps to stop the growth but, barring a miracle, she will die from it. And I began to think about the two emails. We take for granted that daylight savings time comes each spring and, though we hate losing the hour, we know we'll get it back in the fall. But what if we don't? How does it feel to know that you are losing an hour of your life to 'save the daylight' when you know your hours are numbered?
It is a fact that all of our hours are numbered. The difference for my friend is that she now has an estimate of her time while the rest of us assume that we have lots of time left, and you know what they say about assuming. She has a wonderful attitude and is attacking this thing and all of its issues head-on. She is finding the positives in everything that she does. I am certain that she must have moments of being frightened and unsure, but she is making every effort to keep those to a minimum and enjoy each minute of each day.
I wonder how I would react if I were in her shoes. I hope that I would find the humor in everything, after all what is life if you can't laugh? I would hope that I would reach out to those that I love and tell them all of those things that I hope I've always said, but louder and stronger than I've ever said them. I know that I would sing. Singing is how God and I talk to each other. It's always been that way. We do it in public sometimes and that is nice, but mostly we do it privately, just Him and me and it's wonderful! I would want to be outdoors as much as possible. Watching the squirrels (there are six in my yard this morning) and listening to the birds sing, watching the trees sway in the wind. It's like God holding you in His hand.
These are the things I hope that I would do. I, of course, have no idea what I would actually do and I hope that I never have to find out. But we all hope for that and the reality is, as my son reminds me frequently, I'm in the downhill stretch of my life and it is very likely that at some point I will have to deal with health issues. I like to tell him that I plan on living to be about 110 and, since he's an only child, we have a lot of good quality time left.
I just know that I wish for my friend everything that I would wish for myself. I know that she probably hasn't even considered one less hour. She is too focused on enjoying today with her family and friends. She's loving everything about her life, even the tough stuff, because she is alive, for today. After all, that's really all we have, isn't it?
So, as you go about your Saturday, ask yourself: if this were my last day on this earth, is this really how I would spend it? Just something to think about.
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