A Moment

It's funny how a moment can change your life.

Faced yesterday morning with mortality - a wake-up call of sorts from a younger coworker, diagnosd (and successfully treated) with cancer.

It's one of those moments that haunts you through the rest of the day, keeps you quiet as you drive home, even pensive as you go through your evening, surrounded by the noise and clamor of a baseball game.

The question keeps coming up: Why am I doing what I am doing? Does it matter? What should I be doing?

In that moment of self realization, all lesser things take a back seat. All of a sudden, the blandness and mundanity of one's day - the examples of trying less than 100%, of skating through rather than succeeding through - all of this is swept away by the fact that life is real, and time is not what we believe it to be, and so much of what we pretend to do as "important" really isn't.

The thing that surprises me most is the overwhelming feeling of shallowness I felt, that so much of what I am dealing with that I believe to be important is simply window dressing, empty streamers hung in a room which will be briefly enjoyed and then torn down and thrown away.

What are doing with our lives - building structures, or just decorating rooms? One matters and lasts beyond us, the other is merely a passing fancy which will come down sooner than we know.