Life is strange. You live through it everyday, making many of the same choices, doing the same things. I think we often take for granted just what it means to live life to the fullest. At least, I did. I was in for a rather rude awakening when a friend of mine passed away last week. It started off as just another typical day in the life of Colton: going to work at my retail job, a Starbucks iced tea in hand, when I found out that she was gone.
I’d never experienced the pang of losing a friend before. It became impossible for me to recreate the memories we shared because it felt like someone was trying to rip her out of them and replace her with this looming black shadow, coming to swallow me in this pool of spiraling depression. So what did I do? I cried. I cried so much that several customers actually asked if I was okay, and if they needed to fetch my supervisor for me. I should have been embarrassed, but instead, all I could think of was how much I wanted to cry more, just to try to drown the pain.
As the last week has gone on, however, I’ve come to realize that dwelling on what makes me sad will get me absolutely nowhere. I’ve had to tell myself that no one — least of all me — benefits from sitting around, trying to make myself feel even worse about something that I had no power to change. What I’ve come to realize instead is that life is so easy to forget about. We wake up; we go to class; we have our jobs, our families, our hobbies, and we forget about just how special all of these little things are. We forget to take chances and embrace changes that come our way. We lose ourselves in the familiarity. We stick to what we’re used to. But I’ve decided that’s no longer what I want.
Everyone always says that there’s always tomorrow. You’ll always have another chance to change the course of your life. But that’s the thing about tomorrow; maybe it doesn’t come in the way that you anticipated, or maybe it doesn’t even come at all. This is why I want to start making every tomorrow — rather, every today — I have count. I don’t want to miss out on anything this precious life has to offer me. And I have my friend to thank for that.
