What if we imagine our lives as one candle, lit only when we are born, then sheltered from the winds of life until one day the flame just goes out?

 Trying to make sense of life and to not waste the one thing we do have, time, is a most difficult thing to do.  How much time do we waste every day by doing things which waste our only precious and irreplacable commodity?  I know I waste much of mine and others even when what we are trying to do seems most important...at the time.  However, time is not replaceable.  We hear clichés like, "Hurry up, you're burning daylight", or "Tempest Fugits" over and over.  But stop for a moment, use some of the precious time you do have to think about what those things mean.  Who said them in your life?  At what frustration were they uttered?  Time is a finite thing.  It keeps going by, faster and faster until the day you realize you will be lucky if you have as much time left in front of you as you do behind you.  

 It is a very fortunate thing to realize by the age of... say 30?  No, by thirty we already feel old, certainly we joke about being old now.  We can thank a society who seems to value youth, yet by it's very nature youth is fleeting.  

Time seems to go ever so slowly while you wait to be 13, 16, 18, or 21.  We wait for those years like there is some kind of magic, when in reality it means we can become consumers of something we could not mere moments before the magical birthday hour. At 13 we got to wear lipstick, or a bra, start our period, shave or get our first kiss. (Yes I am dating myself.)  Only then were we deemed eligible to get paid in real money to babysit or mow lawns.  And so it begins, the looking even more forward, to  be 16 to date or drive.  To be eighteen to leave home, go to college, or get married, or vote (though I know of few who were actually waiting for the opportunity to vote), or as many young men and women do,  join the service.  

The fact is we didn't realize how you could actually die of something besides old age.  Yes, many of us lost someone we knew to a car or motorcycle accident, war or another freak of nature event.  But to die from a disease was relatively unheard of, unless you were old.  

Communication ensured the opportunity to be aware of all sorts of life ending diseases or social ills like murder.  Yet does life need to continually imitate the things we know about?  Is there more murder, mayhem, child abuse than before the internet?  I think not so much, just that our ability to hear  about it is so much easier.  The tell-all television shows, the books, even blogs,  all contribute to the sordid feel of life today, piling on the world's ills.  Not too much good news lately to focus on.

 Now we boomers are sitting squarely in the sites of the grim reaper, and we don't know if each sunrise or sunset will bring an end to our lives as we know it.  Actually we are facing our mortality as witnessed by all of our public soul searching.  And yet, as seemingly all of the civilized world knows we are all (except the conspicuous 1%) in grave economic trouble and it is killing many of us unnecessarily early.  The stresses of the world are great and varied.  Global warming, spoiling the air, water and food with our trash, fuels, terrorism,  pediphiles...it goes on and on.  Who do we trust now? 

Stress kills. It kills us by making our bodies less able to fight off normal things which are always trying to attack our immune systems.  The stress levels for each person are somewhat different at any given time, but this unrelenting global stress is particularly harmful to us.  Not only do the problems of the financial hurt us, but how it makes people behave towards each other is devestating.  Collectively we turn inward to protect those things we feel important.  We need to be opening our hearts and arms to embrace each other and support them emotionally if we cannot do so in other ways.  Only in this seemingly simple way will we be able to ward off the evils which attack us on a daily basis, and perhaps live our lives with less stress and much more meaning. 

 The holidays are a good place to start.  Make sure your own "candle of life" will stay lit longer by eliminating  the bad attitudes you place out there without thought,  eliminating your worries about being perfect by someone else's standards which are ambiguous and a constantly moving target.  Try loving and forgiving yourself and by being kind to one and other or smiling when it seems impossible to find something to smile about.  Smiles are contagious, and they cost nothing to give.  In this season of madnes, remember the gifts you give which will last longer than anything made in China are those given from your heart, those which pierce the lonliness of the season and warm the heart. They are priceless and I am willing to bet will help your life candle flicker and your heart's wick to last longer.