My mom always tells me to sit outside for a few minutes and get some fresh air because fresh air is good for you and we should appreciate nature and all that God gives us.
I always laugh.
But I was thinking about it the other day.. Maybe I shouldn't laugh.
Maybe I should take a few minutes to "stop and smell the roses."
It can't hurt, can it?
You see, we spend so much of our lives focusing on the big things; or at least on what we consider big. Like, what score we need to get on our standardized tests to get into the colleges we want. Or using all of our life savings that we have on fantasy football teams. And these things are normal and they are important. But are they everything?
We spend our time memorizing dates for history tests and I have spent my time repeating one very fragile date over and over again in my head - July 31st 2013.
On this day, Zimbabwe voted for their new president, republicans rejected obamas tax proposal, San Diego sued their mayor and I, walked into my home on Montoya Circle in the early evening on that Wednesday and was told that my mother had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.
Shocking. Horrifying. Surreal. Not all the adjectives in the entire dictionary could possibly describe how that felt.
Soon after I was told the news, I became a medical expert, or at least I attempted to become one. I researched for hours on end every statistic on the Internet and every possible cure that existed. I drove myself completely crazy thinking that maybe, somehow, I could find something. Anything. All I wanted was a miracle.
I've learned many things over the past few years since my mom was diagnosed, one of those things being that hospitals are something I like to call "miracle homes." The people that work in them work with God to make miracles happen, and then miracles do happen. I one time sat for two hours waiting for my mom to get out of one of her appointments and during my time that I waited, I observed a lot of what was taking place around me. There were several nurses pushing wheelchairs with patients with IVs and hospital gowns and tubes and no hair and pale skin and sad faces and tired eyes. And then after two hours of waiting, I see this beautiful blonde haired woman, around 5'4" with sweatpants and a sweatshirt walk out of a room with a smile on her face. She went straight over to the coffee machine to have some caffeine because even though she seemed happy and energized, the medicine they gave her before whatever scan she just went through made her tired. I went over to her and she was pouring her coffee into a styrofoam cup and when I approached her she asked me, "Do you want some hot chocolate? They have the best hot chocolate here!!"
If you haven't figured it out, this beautiful smiling blonde haired woman is my mom. My mom walked out of her scan and acted as if she had just walked out of a massage. As if she hadn't sat in a room that was smaller than a pantry with radioactive dye going throughout her entire body. As if she didn't just spend another hour in another scan where you can't move an inch or its results aren't effective. She walked out as the antithesis of a "patient" at a cancer hospital. She walked out as a strong and powerful individual, it seemed as if she was faking it. And maybe she was. But even if she was, to fathom that she was able to fake a smile in that cold and what is supposed to be bitter hospital waiting room, gives me and what I think would give anyone hope, that faking a smile on a bad day is possible.
Possible. What about the impossible? What if you were told that what you want and what you hope for and what you dream of fits into the category of the "impossible?" Then what do you do? Put The Fray on repeat until you know every word of every song and shut everyone out in the process?
Now, think - what if someone put an expiration date on your life? What if one day, you woke up and were told that your life was going to be cut short because of tumors that are living inside of you? Is that when you decide that your life is going to be different? Is that when you decide to take a minute or two to "smell the roses?"
Why is it that us as human beings are only inclined to make life something meaningful and appreciate the so-called "little things" when we realize that our lives aren't infinite?
It is a question that has a seemingly endless number of answers, however one in particular that my mom told me, I feel, should be the way we ultimately approach this question: "The next time you're at the beach, take a look, just for a second, at the ocean. You can't see where it ends, you only know where it starts. So think about this in comparison to life. You don't know what or when the end is, so why focus on that? Why focus on what you don't have any control over when you can focus on all that you are capable of controlling?"
And so this got me thinking. Over my four years in high school alone, I have seen so many people spend way too much time frustrated over what they can't fix and what they can't change. And it hurts. It hurts to watch so many people, including myself, clench their fists over the impossible. It pains me that we waste so much of our emotion and our time and our energy over things that we can't change. You can't change why your parents got divorced, and you can't change the fact that you didn't get into the college you wanted and you can't change that your sibling or your parent has a disability so why not leave it up to God?
We spend so much time focusing on everything that we can't change, we end up constantly missing out on all that life has to offer. We don't need someone to give us an expiration date for us to be able to realize that life is fleeting, rather we should appreciate every moment we are given and make the best of our time.
Because time, in the simplest of words, is precious.
Judge Danny Butler, had a son, Mikey, who passed away from cystic fibrosis at the age of 24. Judge Butler, who inspired me to write this when hearing about his son's unbelievable journey, said just a few words that will remain clear in my mind forever - "Mikey didn't want it to be over, he wanted it to be better." This is how I believe everyone should view a hard situation that they are facing; this was Mikey's motto, this is my mom's motto, and we should strive for this to be all of our mottos.
My mom always tells me to sit outside for a few minutes and get some fresh air because fresh air is good for you and we should appreciate nature and all that God gives us.
I always laugh.
But I was thinking about it the other day.. Maybe I shouldn't laugh.
Maybe we should take a few minutes to "stop and smell the roses."
It can't hurt, can it?
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