Live Your Life

We ask ourselves what is most important to us in our lives. Is it our family? Our fortune? Our fame? We number our friends and acquaintances, and we judge others’ lives by the mourners who attend their funerals. But how do we truly measure our own existence? How do we gauge our own individual worth? When each life is lived so uniquely – a singular presence that is witnessed by others only once in history, how does one quantify something so rare as the person who shares our eyes, looking back to us through the mirror?

We hope to trust ourselves even as we measure the trustworthiness of others. We hold those around us suspect until such time as familiarity eases our concerns. And so we may be rewarded or betrayed. For we share common hopes and we have common dreams, but some of those things may be stolen from us by others who have no care or bother. One day, though, they too will see no tomorrow, and they will be left hopeless. Or so we tell ourselves, anyway.

Our vanities shield us from harsh truths, and our modesties govern our egos. Yet neither prevents others from judgments and conclusions about who each of us are, or our places in life. We may only hope to protect ourselves, or project the image we long for others to see and judge us by. But in so doing, we inevitably live the lives others choose for us, at least in some measure, for we have adapted ourselves to be judged less harshly by others. Some such considerations are necessary so that we may lead productive, responsible lives. But there times when these considerations overwhelm us, and they control our lives in such ways that we fear to live our lives in any manner that may offend others. And so then we are theirs, because in little ways, we are living their lives, based upon their perceptions rather than our own.

We should share our unique lives with others, and let them share their uniqueness with us, so that we may each know the rareness in one another. And so then we will know that there are other lives, whether close or far away, that are important like our own, and that we may all share the same desires of living.

Live your life for as long as you are given, and allow others to live theirs, too, so that one day - when there is no tomorrow for each of us, we may say to ourselves that we shared our own lives in this world, and we witnessed others do the same.