The measure of life

I have a friend in a spiral of self destruction, and let me tell you, it is one of the saddest things to behold. Above and beyond the thought of countless lives with the shadow of a slow death by famine, a quick and brutal death at the business end of a gun, or the plain and simple screwing over of the individual in the sway of the democratic process.

Its not sad because it is different than all of the above, but sad because it is the same. Every single person who dies does so as a tangle of things that they are and are not, will and will not be, unrealized potential mixed with so very much that is realized.

But first lets go through an exercise.

Breathe in - go on, humor me
now that action is in the past, something that will never be anything different ever again

Breathe out
Something else now in the past - flowing from the first action, cause bleeds into consequence.

Breathe in  - slower this time
You just changed the past, congratulations, never again will you be trapped by the past, but freed by it. After all, the past is, and always will be, sharing the floorspace with the present.

Will I? Won't I?

We kill each other just because that bastard's stone idol is bigger than mine! Would an animal ever do that?  No! Why? Because it is absolute stark raving madness!

And it is exactly why humans are so beautiful, not because we are a greedy, violent species - but in spite of it. We eat, sleep, dream, murder, and fuck not because we are animals, but because we are humans and because we choose to do so.

Yes, we are an emotional species

Credit : http://cheezburger.com/7864019968

Love, hate, envy, pride, happiness, sadness - the list of things we all feel goes on and on; You have made friends and strangers feel all these things at one point in time or another. I'm sure they all did the same to you as well.

But in the end, and with our emotions - we feel, learn and breathe but most importantly we act. Our futures become our present - an ever fleeting moment we will never escape - and then into the past.

And in the present we have absolute control over what tomorrow will be - because that is what the present is, tomorrow's past and yesterday's future. Built on our previous breath - and the foundation for our next.

TL DR

Humans are not a plague. Life is not a burden to be suffered through; It is a shared hallucination dreamed up by our collective consciousness and put into words so we can inflict our madness on others.

But it is our life, our past, present and future to shape. Ultimately it is so very human to reach out and grab all with both hands and cling to it for dear life.