I knew a young man, he was nineteen when I met him, paralyzed from the neck down, on a ventilator. He’d been shot through the neck. He was in his twenties when he died. He was a wonderful person, pure and simple. I met a young man a few years ago who’d suffered a brain injury in a car accident. During the accident he saw, and I mean, saw, two of his friends get decapitated. I know a woman who went out walking with her husband one winter day pulling their two little children on a sled behind them when a snowmobile driven by a drunk driver crashed into them.  When this woman came out of a coma she learned she was permanently paralyzed from the neck down – and that both her children had died in the accident.

What I’ve just shared with you here helps, I hope, to explain why I pretty quickly weary of those who live in rather than with their problems, Problems take center stage, at the exclusion of everything else. Hell, it seems to me if I kept the problems I face in life center stage, at the exclusion of everything else, I sure as hell wouldn’t be writing this piece and I’d be missing out on a lot of wonderful things in life. No more reading books. No more good conversations. Not more movies, music, healthy love, making love, kissing, laughing, learning, all because my problems in life, difficult as some may be, have more control of my life than they deserve too.

If a large majority of your life is wrapped up in talking about and bemoaning your problems, then those very problems are guilty of robbing you of some wonderful life experiences.

If I see a beautiful sunset, I’ll be damned if I’m not going to disengage from what I’m doing at the moment to take it in. It’s beautiful, one of life’s delicacies, I don’t want to miss it.

Don’t miss the sunsets.

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In loving memory of N.E.