What is life?

Is it the ability to grow? To Breathe? To feel? To have a soul?

So much of this life slips by unnoticed.  We don't realize that all of our coming and going and stopping and starting equals living, until that time is passed. Then a wave of nostalgia can take us back to something as simple as a dish we've washed a thousand times or a pair of shoes filled with signatures.  We don't realize we're making memories, but we always are.  We don't realize that we have made beloved friends until they are taken from us.

Is it living more to experience things beyond mere happenstance?  Would it be better to plot and plan out memories, with pictures and books full of words to remember them by? Does it make it easier when the real thing disapears?  I don't think so.  But there's a certain guilt that comes from staying home too many days in a row, spending evenings amid books and in the kitchen instead of with the people we love.

As with many things, I suspect the best path is somewhere in-between.  I didn't make any new years resolutions this year, but perhaps a good one would have been to seize each and every moment- weather small or large- and live it to God's glory.  It is not enough to wade through life as though it is only a drugery, nor is it sufficient to try to fly from mountain peak to mountain peak.

For life is not about finding happiness.  Neither is it all losses and crosses.  It is a conglomeration of moments strung out into hours, days, and weeks that make up our years, and those years are shockingly few in number.  How we spend those years is not really up to us.  One day we will look back, and it will all seem like a breath.

So don't let a moment slip by un-lived!