What Matters Most...Living and Dying

There is a book that I would recommend called The Four Things That Matter Most. I was going to write about it more in depth today but I'm much too tired to do it justice. The stories in the book are drawn from end-of-life situations but really it is about living and relationships.

Even the most healthy relationships are flawed. I wish for anyone reading this to be aware of opportunities given them to forgive, love, appreciate and nurture relationships. I think many of us are stuck not knowing how to do those things or how to ask for what we need from people. I hope that you learn to complete your relationships. They don't have to be ending for you to make them whole and to not leave things unsaid.

I've not yet figured this out for my own life. Always learning this stuff. I guess many things do not come naturally to me and take effort to find the words, especially towards certain people.

The book says that what matters most are being able to complete your relationships by having discussions around these statements:

Will you please forgive me?
I forgive you.
Thank you.
I love you.

And lastly, being able to say Goodbye is very important when someone is dying or leaving or a relationship is ending.

I've tried really hard to say what matters. Part of me wants to write the authors and tell them they suck because many times it gets me nowhere. But I know that if I never understand why it mattered, that it still must. I can hope anyway. I hope my relationship with most people wasn't for nothing.

Waiting for a Star to Fall

I laid on my back staring at the sky. Looking for the “spectacular” meteor shower for which I’ve waited all week. It was so dark in my back yard. And if it not for a group of kids playing a very excited game of hide and go seek at the ballpark behind my house, it would have also been very quiet. I only saw one. One meteor. Maybe two. But the second one I couldn’t be sure of. Before my eyes could refocus their attention towards it, it faded. Or maybe it wasn’t ever there in the first place. Maybe my eyes are playing tricks on my mind. I don’t know. I can’t be sure.
As I laid there thinking about the meteor that was or wasn’t there, my thoughts drifted to people.

I thought of how some people in your life are like the second meteor that was or wasn’t there. And of how you can never be sure of them. The more you look for them, the more they fade away. And then I’ll remember something they said to me or something they shared with me or something I felt because of them and for a moment, there they are. But are they? Were they ever there? I can’t be sure. And the memory fades.

And it is sad. How unsure I am of them. How I can’t be sure of anything about them. How I can’t rely on my own memories of them because their words became untrue and disappeared from the pages when I needed them. Just like how I believed that there were lots of meteor showers somewhere in the darkness that I was staring into…logically, I knew they were there but something prevented me from seeing them…light pollution, clouds, the angle I was watching... the moth that kept attacking me! I knew they were there behind the black blanket of sky…but how could I be sure? I couldn’t. So I just watched…and waited.