Accept death, Embrace life.

Somewhere, an hourglass stands. Grains of sand slip down from the top, one at a time..

Tick

The ear shattering wail of the siren rips through the base, in about 30 seconds the first shells will start landing all around us. A short distance away several tanks rest in an open building. We break into a run.

Tick

Most people are afraid of death, and that it is entirely understandable. Fearing death enough to take precautions to prevent it is necessary. Species that lack a healthy level of apprehension about the possibility of sudden demise end up like the Dodo did, precisely because he lacked a proper level of fear of dying.

But I would invite you to consider that it is also necessary to confront an unavoidable fact; Life is fatal. Sooner or later you will die.

All too often we live as if we have all the time in the world. Postponing what we know deep inside that need doing, from today to tomorrow, and from tomorrow to never.

Life is short, and fickle, every single day people’s time runs out. Yours will too, soon enough.

Those grains of sand dropping in that hourglass patiently measure how long you have left is the length of your life. Each grain a single moment. How many moments are left in your hourglass? Maybe a decade, maybe half a century, maybe a week.

Whether you acknowledge it to yourself, or whether you don’t. Those ever so precious grains keep on relentlessly dropping. There is much that you can buy in this world, but as too many people find out too late, on their deathbed, time lost isn’t one of them.

On your final day, as you let out your last breath, what emotion will characterize that moment? Will you be satisfied that in the time give to you, you have done all you could? Tried your best? Loved as much as you could? How much did you touch the people around you? Will you live on in the hearts of people?

Or will you be tormented by guilt, haunted by bitter regret? For all the things left unsaid, for all the paths not taken, not even attempted.

Did you tell those close to you how much you loved them? What they mean to you? Did you take the time to listen to their pain, and their joy? Hug them and celebrate through sorrow and joy?

That pretty girl, are you still tormented years later by doubt, of whether perhaps she also thought you were kinda cute? Maybe be never trying you gave up on a meaningful lifetime together? Or maybe you wonder could you have succeeded at some other craft, a riskier one, but one that your heartstrings yearned for, but you never took that leap.

Or maybe you are in a relationship that you know is poisoning your soul, that is dragging you down into deep depths, and yet having failed to accept that the moments given you are precious, you postpone, you hem and you haw, ending something that is only getting worse, because you are under the misapprehension that your time will last forever.

Are you afraid of dying? Or maybe what you’re really afraid of is realizing at your final moments, that you never truly tried to live.

My grandfather has long since been laid to rest. And yet every single day I see him in the mirror, doing that funny stretch he always did on one leg, he lives on in the wonder and joy that I found that is to be found in watching my children grow, because he showed me.

While both Rudyard Kipling is long gone, his love of his son comes to life when I read to my own son, Kipling’s profoundly moving poem If, which Kipling lovingly wrote for his son, who died too young in the hellscape of Normandy’s trenches.

David Kalichman, has long since passed, and yet the memory of the last time my grandmother saw her father, on her wedding day, through the fence surrounding the communist concentration camp where he soon after died, lives on. Passed on to me as a warning from my mother, to beware the siren call of false prophet’s with sweet promises of a utopia.

The last thing I tell my children every night that I put them to bed, is that I love them, that they are loved. I kiss each one, and turn off the lights. Because you never know, perhaps this will be the last time. One day, it will be the last time I tell them that they are loved, let them know that they are precious. Having made peace with the temporary nature of my existence, I know that the time for such things is today.

Make a point of expressing your gratitude and appreciation of your friends, your loved ones, your parents, your siblings. Face the discomfort of trying to mend the relationships that you broke, or that someone else did.

If what you are doing with your life is not meaningful to you, then remember that these moments will not come back, and see how you can move towards what is.

Accept that you will die. Because once you accept that unavoidable fact, you will feel how precious are the moments comprising the rest of your life and, you might be inclined to treat them as such. What are you not doing, that will give these precious grains that you have left, those finite moments of your life, meaning? What do you feel, deep down inside that you should do, that you want to do, but you’re pushing it off, you’re only half trying?

Do it, take the plunge, take the risk, you might not get another chance. Embrace a commitment to yourself, to do your best to live each moment that you have left in the best way that you can..

We make it to the tanks, and crawl under the relative safety of their protection. I lie on my back, on the ground, several tons of steel lie a few inches from my face. The booming of the shells landing start spreading around us. The canteen from which we just came soon closed, after a direct hit. Over the next few days the incessant shelling will lead to the hourglass clocks of 2 men on base to suddenly run out..

I reach into my pocket, fish out a green pack of Noblesse cigarettes, place one in my mouth and light it, breathing in deeply the sweet-bitter smoke. For now, I yet have a few grains left in my hourglass.

Tock.

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Dedicated to K, my Jiminy Cricket, for her loyal support, and for sharing her own unique way of seeing life

And to Tamar, in the hopes that one of us recruits the will, to see if we can mend what I carelessly broke, before we run out of time