None of us will get out of here alive. I found myself saying that to a friend the other day. That’s the great equalizer and the main thing we all have in common. It can be scary news or good news, depending on how we live.
I just spent two hours last night on the radio in a major market, delivering messages from loved ones on the Other Side to those still here mourning their loss. When the host asked how long I’ve had this gift, I shared that I’ve always had it, but it was about owning it, and that process took many years.
What finally pushed me to help others with this unusual gift, was knowing how empty loss can feel when you lose someone who was an anchor, someone you never fathomed would physically leave. It doesn’t matter who that person was humanly in your life, or what label they had around you. It can be a friend who was supposed to be a sister, or a great-aunt that always felt like the grandmother you never had. A true soul connection is felt deep within and when that person is physically gone, you feel it pulled from underneath you.
The irony was last year when I found out a friend I didn’t know that well had passed, I was surprised at how his loss affected me and still affects me to this day. The words not said and more times that should have been spent in person. That loss was a catalyst to live more courageously, to use my gifts to help others as much as I could until my own last breath.
As we get older, time becomes the most precious commodity. Each week skips by faster. When we know that none of us will get out of this alive, we can choose to live consciously and use the gifts we were given, and to not waste the time we’re given.
When we don’t live fully aware about the finality we all will one day have, like when we hear about a murder or a death on the news or through friends, we can chalk it up to the “that happens to other people” category of our brains, and go through life wasting it away. Literally wasting our time away like a sieve, slowly, with seemingly little things like looking electronically at what someone else is doing. Those are minutes that add up to hours and days that we can never have back from our own life, establishing our own life path and marking why we chose this life.
Our life path is definitely not about wasting precious minutes and hours looking at what the rest of the world is doing.
We only have limited time to leave our own mark, our legacy of why we were here, and we don’t want a large chunk of that time to be looking over virtually at how other people are living, or how great their life supposedly is. If we’re standing on line at the store looking down at a piece of glass at what the rest of our friends are now doing, we may miss the very real, human moment right in front of us, of possibly making a new friend that we otherwise would have missed looking down.
Nor, conversely, do we want to be wasting time taking photos, such as of a cup of coffee we’re about to drink, or where we are in the world, to show others how wonderful our life is, even if that wasn’t our intent. Not only does it negate our own precious moment of being present with ourselves, but it creates access points for those we may never meet who will look at our life and possibly feel bad about their own dearth in life, or lack of a life, because they looked at what they perceived as the wealth we have, materially or non-materially, and are showing the world. I wouldn’t want the fact that I unwittingly made someone feel bad, on my soul when I cross over.
Someone said, “You’re more in the spirit world than you are in the physical world.” I replied, “Yes!” We are all spirits housed in these temporary, daily-aging bodies, here to experience life lessons and to be a catalyst and play roles for others for their life lessons and human experiences. And when we are met with our own “Come to Jesus Moment” where we feel like we’re on our knees in front of the universe, we have no choice but to view life through a deeper, more spiritual lens.
That’s why we’re here. And once we’re done learning and using our gifts to leave a mark of why we were here, then it’s time to graduate. And hopefully we did as much as we could to graduate with high marks.