NOT MY BLOG

The following is copied from a commencement address; wish they were my words!

Get a life.   A real life, not a manic  pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger  house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if  you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of  salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red tailed hawk circles over the water or  the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a  Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you  are not alone.   Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.  Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter.

Get a life in which you are generous.   And realize that life is the best thing ever,   and that you have no business taking it for granted.   Care so deeply  about its goodness that you want to spread it around.   Take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity.   Work in a  soup kitchen.   Be a big brother or sister.   All of us want to  do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.  It is so easy to exist instead of to  live.

I learned to live many years ago.   Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that,  if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. And  what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give  some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly.    And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had  learned.  By telling them this:

Consider the lilies of  the field.  Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear.  Read in the backyard with the sun on your face.   Learn to be happy.   And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.