Today is Halloween. Every Halloween I always seem to think about people who have died. This year for some reason it seems like more and more people are dying. I have the AARP app on my phone. It has been on my phone for the last two years. Every day I get notifications of different articles and new stories. Most of the time I don’t pay attention, but once in a while, there’s a story about a famous celebrity who has passed away. It happens. However, this year I felt like the AARP app had turned dark and disturbing because it felt like almost every week, I got a notification for an article about a celebrity passing away.
I know that the AARP app wasn’t sinister. I know that the number of celebrities passing away wasn’t changing either. It just feels that way. The reason it feels that way is I am getting older. I am more and more aware of mortality, and I know more of the celebrities that are at the age when they pass away. When I was younger, there were just as many passing away, but I didn’t notice as much because I didn’t know who they were.
I realize that even with death all things are relative. There’s a commercial running right now for one of the car companies. It is suggesting that if you give up in your pursuit for greatness in athletic achievement no one will know your name, but that you won’t give up and “they” will remember your name. It’s a great idea, but fame is so fleeting. The famous people right now won’t be famous one hundred years from now. Their names won’t be remembered and even if they are, just wait five hundred years or one thousand years. It will be forgotten. We aren’t that special. Our lifetimes are like a grain of sand on a beach or like a drop of water in the earth’s oceans. We are small and forgettable.
It’s okay. Death is just a change in our existence just like birth was when we were born. I don’t know what happened to be before I was born, and I don’t know what will happen after I die. I don’t expect to be remembered. I never really wanted to be famous. I just wanted to love and be loved.
I am a part of a life force that has been around since the beginning of time and will be around long after I am dead. If I contribute anything to that it will be the love that I add and the hope that I can share. If I can let just one person know that we are all one and that because of that we should hate each other, we should love each other as we love ourselves because we are one body, one force, and one life. And if that person can take that knowledge and continue to share it, then that would be wonderful. If it could infect our spiritual body and spread love around the world, then that would be just great. And if it could just spread to a few, then that would be good, too. I don’t need my life to change the world, I just need my life to be about love. I know that if it was, then it will have meaning whether or not it makes any difference to the world. I have faith in that.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
