It depends on how you look at it…
What an incredible
philosophy to find in a friend’s father’s obituary. A few words that say a shit
ton about how someone chose to live.
It reminds me of how Joni looked at both
sides.
Think about it. Two people can look at the
same situation and see entirely different things. One sees an obstacle while the
other sees an opportunity. One sees a rainy Saturday as a ruined weekend. The
other sees an excuse to stay home, make soup, and read a good book.
Neither is wrong, they are simply looking
at the same world through different windows.
An obituary is an odd place to discover a
lesson about perspective. After all, the person whose life is being remembered
has run out of tomorrows, while the rest of us are still busy worrying about
ours.
At twenty, sixty seemed ancient. At sixty,
twenty seems like yesterday.
When we are young, we measure life by what
lies ahead. As we grow older, we begin measuring it by what we have
experienced. The disappointments that once seemed catastrophic become stories
we tell at Thanksgiving dinner. The ordinary afternoons we barely noticed
become the memories we would give anything to revisit.
That is the great gift of growing older. We
begin to understand that happiness is not always about changing what is in
front of us. Sometimes it is about changing how we see it.
I
wouldn't suggest that everything in life can be simplified by looking at it in
a different light.
Death is death, grief is grief, and a
broken heart still hurts, regardless of the angle from which you examine it.
…But perspective can change what we carry
away from all of those negative experiences.
We
can look at the death of someone we love and see only the years we will not
have together anymore. Or we can look at that same life and feel gratitude for
the years we did have together.
Both feelings are legitimate and both can
exist in the same heart. Maybe that is what makes those eight words so
powerful. We spend the first half
of our lives trying to change the world around us and the second half
discovering that sometimes all we needed to change was the way we looked at it.
This morning, I found eight words in
an obituary that made me reconsider the day ahead.
It depends on how you look at it….
The sun rises in the east whether we are
happy or miserable. The clock keeps ticking whether we are grateful or
complaining. Another perfectly good Saturday is sitting outside our front door,
waiting to be lived.
It depends on how you look at it.
And the beautiful thing is, we get to
choose.
I choose gusto and astonishment. I
choose to love rather than hate. I choose to see the blessings before the
burdens. Because Sunday October 25th isn’t promised, but Saturday
October 24th is sitting right in front of my big ass.
