Everyone is guilty of going through each day like it’s nothing. We all assume that we will have tomorrow to do whatever it is we wanted to do today. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. For many people, their last day comes way too soon, and there was still so much that they wanted to do.
We often focus on the things that we don’t have instead of being grateful for everything that we do have. It’s easy to overlook the things that we use every day or even things like food and clean water. We don’t realize how lucky we are to have these things until we learn that there are people in this world who don’t even have the basic things needed to survive. These people that have the least are the ones who give the most, and the ones we can all learn something from. I know it’s easy to focus on the negative things in our lives and the things we don’t have, but life would be so much better if we focused on all the positive things instead.
My biggest fears are having more regrets in life than things I’m proud of and not saying everything I want to say to someone before they’re gone. These fears crept into my life over the past five years. I grew up in a small town -- a town that has seen more death in the past five years than any town should. The sudden loss of friends, family and classmates that we all experienced, has taught our small town not to take anything or anyone in our lives for granted. We lose people to life changing accidents more than we would like to acknowledge and it never hurts less than the time before.
We definitely take advantage of the people we have in our lives. It’s easy to make the assumption that we will always have these people, and it takes us losing them to realize how wrong we really were. We become accustomed to the things around us. It becomes easy to forget about all of the “little” things we are so lucky to have and how lucky we are to have so many loving people in our lives.
The people we take for granted the most are the ones we should be thanking for everything we have: our parents. They have supplied us with a roof over our heads, food on our table and endless love since the day we were brought into their world. It’s easy to be ungrateful for our parents because we know that they are most likely to be some of the few constant people in our lives. Most of us expect them to give up many things for us to be happy but aren’t willing to do the same for them. So many people will take them for granted until you wake up one morning and realize they’re no longer there.
I’ve felt the pain of losing someone so suddenly and with no explanation at all, and those times were the ones that taught me to not take anything or anyone I have for granted. We should love everything and everyone in our lives with all of our heart. Tell people you love them often and never assume that you can say these things tomorrow, because tomorrow may not come.
