Life really is an amazing thing. There are so many choices that we each make every single day, and who knows how our lives would change if we had made any of them differently?
I’m not talking about chaos theory, which suggests that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo that it could cause a hurricane in the Gulf. I’m just talking about simple things. Life – what a wonder!!!
Life is incredibly tenuous. We are here one moment, and the next we might be gone. We don’t think about those things often, but it is true. None of us have guarantees. I worked for a man once who had done 2 tours of duty as a platoon commander in Vietnam, who had just completed his two-week annual assignment at the Pentagon (he was a colonel in the Marines) and who passed his Marine Corps physical while he was there. One his first day back to work, he didn’t feel all that great – thought he was getting the flu. I didn’t like some of the symptoms I was seeing in his body and suggested he go see his doctor on the way home. He did – and the doctor said he was fine. But when Dave walked through the front door of his house, he was on the floor, dead immediately, from a massive heart attack. He was 42. I went home that night with a renewed sense of how fragile is the rope of life to which we cling.
Life is also incredibly persistent. In my line of work, I’ve been with numerous people when they have departed this life. What never ceases to amaze me is how hard the physical body hangs on to life. No matter how much suffering one does in the last few days, weeks or months, there is something in our constitution that just fights for all it is worth to resist dying.
Today’s picture is of a weed growing up through the asphalt on the way down the long driveway to our mailbox. I first noticed it on Tuesday and it made me think about how hard life fights to survive – how persistent it is. I’ve seen trees growing right out of granite in Yosemite National Park – where a tiny seed became lodged in a tiny crevice and it took root…and eventually the roots cracked the rcck.
Life is amazing.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: in 1969, the Boeing 747 airliner made its first test flight. Makes you wonder if you’ve been riding around on any 42 year old jets, eh?
TRIVIA FOR TODAY: spider silk is incredibly strong – much stronger than steel. Scientists have calculated that a strand of spider silk that is the thickness of a pencil could stop a 747 in flight. No wonder Spiderman could fly from building to building without his web strand breaking!
Twolfgcd's Blog (Galen Dalrymple) 