While You Still Have Them

While you have your legs, run freely in the grass. Feel the earth between your toes, play tag with your friends, catch touchdowns, and let the sun tire you out. While you have your hands, conduct full symphonies. Write love letters and journal your happiest memories, get an A+ on your assignments. Run your fingers over colorful flowers and warm sand beaches. 

While you have your mind, create masterpieces like only you can. Organize lists, raise funds for great causes, tell stories, and soak up every drop of knowledge that today's world has waiting for you. Learn more about things you love and research things you've never heard of. 

While you still have your teeth, smile the biggest and brightest smile until your cheeks hurt. Laugh with a full belly, spend time with people who make you brighter, and even smile in the face of adversity and dark nights. Smile so brightly that the world needs sunglasses. 

While you still have your family and friends, appreciate them fully. Spend time with the ones you can, and check up on the ones you can't. Use your phone to brighten someone else's day by simply saying 'hello'. Cancel other plans to be a shoulder when they're sad, or toast to their success. When they've won, you've won. Hug too long, squeeze too tight. Say 'I love you' often, but NEVER say 'goodbye'.

Our days are too short, and they go by way too fast. The gifts and the people and the places that fill your daily life today, will be gone next year, or next month, or next week.  Love these things now, while you still have them. 

Shutting Out The Noise

We are busy. We are stressed. We are overwhelmed. We are under-rested. We are unsure. We are stacking our over-filled plates on top of each other until it's too high to even see what's directly in front of us. This whirling blur of a roller coaster is called adulthood. And without any outside forces giving us anything else to do, we will be busy and stressed about SOMETHING for the rest of our too-short lives. That's why it's important to minimize the noise. 

This blog isn't meant to be a fatalistic, doom and gloom look at life as an adult. It's not even meant to be a PSA about stress. You will balance your life once you get the rhythm down, and you'll figure out where your priorities and decompression activities lay. This blog is about taking care of yourself and your responsibilities first and foremost. It's about picking your battles. Knowing what to go to war over, and when to lay down your sword and take off your armor.  

In today's world, everybody wants to be outspoken and identifiable with their causes. And there is a lot of nobility in that. But in constantly fighting for others and bareing other crosses, we often forget about our own daily battles. Enough time filling others' cups will surely leave you parched and empty and behind on your own care. 

I'm not saying not to be an activist, or not to be there for your relationships. Those things are important. But it's equally (if not more) important to take care of your own mind, body, house, and rest. As much as we'd like to, we can't be everywhere at once. So sometimes, we have to just BE. Get busy with the things that make YOU happy, and make time for the things that heal YOU. 

The world is hard enough without extra people forcing negativity into our orbit. You don't always have to stand for something, and you don't always have to react with energy, anger, and quickness. Marinate on the people around you, and take time to bring in the things that give you peace. The rest may just be noise that is causing you to lose sight of your own important future. 

Grieving

I lost my Uncle Jerry this past week, and it brought a wave of emotions all around me. I saw him struggle, and it made me upset to see such an upbeat guy in so much pain. But I saw him cognizant, even dying in hospice, still cracking jokes. His sharpness and his detailed stories, even while he was gasping for breath, were astounding to me. It made me think about the duality of life, and our responses to tough circumstances. 

Here was this man, laying there as everyone said "see you later" (I never say "goodbye") on his deathbed, still telling me he was proud of me, and trying to motivate me. If being surrounded by loved ones and telling old stories isn't the perfect legacy, then trying to help others at the end, surely is. My Uncle Jerry had both. 

It was painfully sad to lose his physical presence, and I broke down a bit outside of his room. It's hard to see your family cry, and it's even harder knowing that you haven't seen most of them in years. As weddings and funerals become the most prevalent markers of the passage of time, we see our mortality as others look at how much we've grown. Infants become adults, adults become weathered matriarchs, and weathered matriarchs become dearly departed. The cycle moves on, all too quickly. 

I said all of that to say: that the most vivid memories I had this week were of my uncle, mobile and smiling. Me as a happy child, running freely, his little "Merink". So, when you do see your old family and friends, hug them a little longer. Call them more, take more pictures, tell them you're proud of them. The harsh reality is, they won't be here for long. But remember them as the people that raised you when life was easier, bigger, and more timeless. We all need to hold onto that part of us a little longer. Uncle Jerry would've wanted it that way. 

See you soon, Uncle Jerry. Your Merink is proud of you.