Where We Belong

"Death is not always the tragedy we perceive it to be." - Daisy Moser

We live in a world ripe with tragedy:  The attack on Nice, Paris, the shootings in Dallas, Texas, the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, just to name a select few.  

But, for all the pain and turmoil they create, tragedies produce a strangely fertile soil for beauty, hope, and love to take root.  Whether it's drawing people together, smacking us sober, or injecting us with an adrenaline shot of thought and emotion, a surprising amount of good can come from tragedies, even if it's just reminding us how precious life is.

Life is precious.  Every day.  Every moment.  Every breath.

Most of us know this, but it's easy to let it slide to the mental back-burner as we go about our routines.  After awhile, life can start to feel more given guarantee and less precious privilege.  I mean, I've been alive for 26+ years with my mortality "relatively" unchallenged.  It can be pretty easy to start feeling falsely invincible.

But life is as fragile as it is beautiful.  Like a flower suspended on an easily snapped stem, our lives are housed in delicate vessels.  Whether it be a car crash, capsizing, medical mystery, overdose, or out-of-the-blue, we are all probably a little less invincible than we'd like to admit.

We are here for, but a season.  That season could be as long as a winter in Alaska or as short as a summer in the South Pole.  No matter how many heartbeats we've been bestowed, someday we'll all have to turn in the keys to these bodies.

On the surface, that can start to sound pretty depressing, but in the acknowledgement of life's fragility isn't that where we come face-to-face with its beauty?  Isn't it in the moments where our lives uncomfortably butt up against mortality that what really matters comes into clear focus?  

Maybe it was when you spun out in the snow and weren't sure if your car was gonna drift into the other lane or not.  Or maybe it was that time you almost sunk your boat and weren't sure if you were gonna make it back to shore.  Maybe it was the loss of a loved one to sickness, or maybe it was just listening to a stirring song.  Whatever the scenario, these moments bring us together, smack us sober, and remind us what really matters in this fleeting, but precious thing called life.

Saying life is precious doesn't mean life isn't hard.  Life is hard.  Really hard.  To quote one of my friends, Bill, "Life is messy."  I couldn't agree more.  Sometimes life feels as messy as me eating spaghetti in a white shirt.  Heck, writing this has been a messy, struggle.  Still for as much as we'd like to skip over struggles and tragedy, they do have a way of laying a strangely firm foundation for beauty, hope, and love to build upon.  That's why struggle and tragedy never have the final word no matter how much they'd like to.

Regardless, I think we all still long for that moment when all will be right with the world and within ourselves.  I think that's one of the reasons the following song speaks to me so deeply.  It delves into the difficult divide between how simultaneously precious and hard life is.  Here's a raw, personal rendition of it:




An excerpt from the second verse:

"Feels like we're just waiting! waiting!
While our hearts are just breaking! breaking!
Feels like we've been fighting against the tide"

And from the first verse:

"But I'm not sentimental, this skin and bones is a rental
And no one makes it out alive."

And yet amidst all the lyrical struggle, I find this song incredibly hopeful.  Maybe that's the real reason I find it so meaningful.  It injects hope into the middle of the struggle with hope singing the loudest.  And isn't that what we're all here to do?  Inject hope into the middle of the struggle?