“Patients sometimes get better. You have no idea why, but unless you give a reason, they won’t pay you. Anybody notice if there’s a full Moon?” – House, M.D.
Proof time is fleeting. This is now 205 pounds (that’s sixteen metric tons) and is going to college in less than twenty-two months.
If you live to be 80 – you will have lived through 1042 full Moons (maybe 1043, depends on when in the month you were born). That seems like a lot of full Moons, but if you’re, say, 28, you’ve already burned that number down to 677.
How many of those full Moons will you see? If you’re part of today’s smart phone obsessed majority, not many. Here’s a pretty powerful quote from Paul Bowles’ book, Sheltering Sky:
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full Moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless…
In a point I’ve (tried) before to make: You’re dead. What, exactly, are you going to do about it? How are you going to live . . . today . . . to justify all that you are?
Inside each of us is our vision of ourselves. It’s not as the world sees us. It’s as we see ourselves. And our minds are powerful tricksters. Jordan Peterson (I’ve written about him (LINK), (LINK), and (LINK)) spoke in one video I watched about treating a girl with anorexia. She could easily distinguish, say, which book or piece of paper was larger, but she could see no difference between the size of her thigh and that of Dr. Peterson. So Peterson had her trace her thigh’s width while sitting on a piece of paper. Then he had her trace the width of his thigh. She was shocked that his was so much larger than her emaciated thigh.
You know the type of person that you think you are – what kind of person does the outside world see?
I think that as we (as a society) become more enmeshed in the inner and virtual world, we become somewhat apathetical to what goes on in the actual, physical world. I’ve talked with multiple parents of high school aged children and their parents are concerned: the kids don’t seem to want to do anything. They’re enjoying life, but the drive to perform and achieve seems to be missing.
“Where is he going to school?”
“We’re just trying to get him out of high school.”
And the Moon keeps circling the Earth.
How do you feel about yourself?
Does the world see you the way that you do?
What are you going to accomplish before the next full Moon?
There are no guarantees.
Get going.
