Smoke & Mirrors

Say what you will, but there are moments when time just stands still.  Moments when life pauses and you come to a realization.  It happens to everyone, whether you are the President or a lowly prisoner, because in the end we are all just people, with our feelings and our thoughts, with our fears and our temptations.  It takes a tragedy of Kobe Bryant’s caliber to remind us of our own mortality, bringing the all-familiar “Life Is Short” cliché back to the forefront of our minds. 

But it is not about Kobe, and it is definitely not about life being short.  When the dust settles, we all go on with our lives, having suppressed the thoughts of our transience as deep and far away as possible.  Life may be short, but it is also incredibly fast, and the daily rotation quickly sucks us back into the rut.   

Hemingway once said that only passion for living, and love, are capable of pushing death out of our minds.  Days such as today remind us that it is all about the people we love, people we will leave behind and people that ultimately care whether we live or die.  People that will support us if we score zero or we score one hundred points.  Those are few and far between, but we all know precisely who they are.  The rest of it all is nothing but self-created smoke and mirrors, distracting us from the present moment, the now.