Lust for Life

"For each thing you do, stop and ask yourself if death is to be feared because it deprives you of this."

Back 'in the day' I used to be quite the adrenaline junkie. Nothing too extreme, but the ordinary ways of passing time were little too... Well, let's just say I itched for something more. Thrill, risk, danger, etc. The other night I was watching a documentary film on extreme skiing. While softly swearing under my breath, I was simultaneously wondering where my own hurl-through-the-air, jump-out-of-a-perfectly-good-plane adrenaline junkie had gone. (She messed up her ankle during the landing on her first (solo) jump. Perhaps this taught her to respect the fact that man was not meant to throw himself at the surface of his tiny piece of the galaxy from several thousand feet above it. Then again, perhaps it just taught her that you can't always blindly trust the guy on the ground with the signal sticks.)

Now jump ahead a few days to me doing a lot of walking and reflecting on death. The above quote has doggedly attached itself as a filter to my conscious stream of thought. I sometimes wish that I had a clarity of vision about all of my activities that enabled me to say 'Yes! I don't want to be deprived of this!'. I suspect though that such is not the lot of humankind, nor perhaps should it be. But I realize that I can say 'Yes!' to at least two things, and this brings a clarity of its own.

And while I may have lost the desire to recklessly court danger, I dare say that I have not lost my lust for life. In my cold, tired, caffeine-deprived state, this makes me very happy.

"It's not my time, I'm not going.
There's a fear in me but its not showing...
...There's a will in me and now I know that.
This could be the end of me
And everything I know.
Ooohh but I won't go."