The Next Five Minutes

I am going to stray a bit from my usual musings about design, architecture and art that preoccupy my thoughts most of the time. Everything that you think is of utmost importance, and that you think should be important to others, becomes a bit small when tragedy intrudes into our lives. Within the past two years, the most destructive wildfires in the history of the state have occurred within 10 miles of my home. In Oklahoma, tornadoes devastated entire communities in the span of minutes. In Newtown, Connecticut, beautiful innocent children were lost to the whim of evil. In the face of these events, the daily grind of life seems to become a trivial pursuit of meaningless intentions and we become painfully aware of the vacuum of safety that we live in is only an illusion.

We live our lives and we strive for our goals, complete our daily tasks, love the ones we are with and enjoy our distractions. We go about our daily journey under the illusion that tragedy exists, but not in our little world and not in our little corner of earth. We construct this illusion in the hopes that we can live our lives without the fear of the unknown because fear of the unknown is most incapacitating fear of all. If we fear that which we do not know, then we fail to live and we waste the precious gift of the time of our lives, however much time that may be. We cannot pre-occupy our lives with the fear of what might happen, because if we do, nothing will.

 There is a very poignant commercial out there right now that illustrates this point perfectly. There are sharks in the ocean, but yet we swim. We know that tornadoes and fires and hurricanes are real, yet we live in places called tornado alley and build our homes in beautiful forests and tranquil coastlines. We send our kids to school, even as we mourn the innocent children of Sandy Hook.

Rather than construct an illusion where fate only brings bliss and happiness, we should embrace the very fact that  the next five minutes is a gift not yet given, and the last five minutes is a precious gift already received.   

Stay strong Colorado!

RBP

6/14/13