A fond farewell or good riddance?

When I woke up this morning, I grabbed a cup of coffee and got online.  Everywhere I went was just catastrophic news, hurricanes, mudslides, helicopter/airplane crashes, typhoons and the polar ice caps are apparently melting at a much faster and alarming rate.

Now all of that was just this morning’s news.  I know with this many people on the planet, more disasters are going to happen or maybe with our communications being so advanced, we just hear about them more often.  Actually it’s probably both.

The odds of something happening to us have drastically increased over the years simply because we live on a very over-populated planet – the cities are too crowded with traffic and with all the various means of travel, it all just increases the chance of something happening to us or someone we love.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “live each day like it’s your last” and we should live this way, with common sense of course, we still need to plan for tomorrow.  What it means is, enjoy life for what it is.  Appreciate each day and enjoy the events and people of that day.

I live in a city, so there’s always horrible traffic.  Sometimes you’ll sit at an intersection through four or five changes of the light before you get to go.  Now you know this is going to happen to you before you leave home – so why do we have people yelling, cussing and honking?  I stopped by Blockbuster while I was out and about recently, and after making our selections – my son and I got in line.  There was only one other person in front of  us, so as we went to step up to check out, another woman jumped in front of us.

When she was told to get in line, she said she was and it’s now her turn.  We didn’t say anything, whatever, but she didn’t even turn around and say “excuse me” or “I’m sorry”!  She’s just one of those that think she’s too good to wait in line like everyone else.  Next stop was the grocery store.

Now I did get a little aggravated here.  All the checkouts had long lines, I was ok with that, it happens – but the woman in front of us at the checkout was so lazy that she wouldn’t even pick her filled sacks up and place them in her cart.  So the cashier had to stop, walk around and get all the sacks and place them in the woman’s cart, so she would have room to continue ringing up the rest of her groceries.

Oh come on!  Everyone knows at this store you load your own bags, how can you be this lazy?  Then she gave me a dirty look for saying something about it.

The moral of this story?

With the frequency of deaths due to catastrophic events or life just happening, we don’t know how much time we have.  Do you want to be remembered as the cranky, hateful, self-absorbed person portrayed in this story or a kind, un-selfish, caring, loving humanitarian?  It actually requires less energy to be nice, it takes anger and stress to be mean.  So why can’t we just roll with the flow and bend like a twig on a tree?  Will the last memory of you be, “what a loss, that was such a nice person!” or “good riddance, that was such an ass!”?

Can ya dig it?