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I’m taking more time.

I headed off by myself for a few days last week, wandered about some trails, sat and stared across a lake for a few hours, just stared, thought about people who I used to know, used to love–love still, I suppose–and came to a few conclusions.

Nothing is more important than love. Spending as much time with people who make you forget all about what might happen next, what happened already, people who chase away anxiety and dismiss regret, who finish your sentences, know when to laugh, know when to sit in silence while you cry. Know when to hold on and when to hold on even tighter. Nothing, I swear to you, nothing can possibly be more important than this. We build our lives and occupations and make contributions to society so we can know we played our part in this powerful play that just goes on and on, and that’s all right and true, but it remains secondary at best, a shadow at best, to how our lives can only be truly illuminated by the love of those who make us understand more of who we are. Those who we celebrate for who they are, all of each of them, not just the parts we find convenient.

I’ve been around the block and have had the good fortune to ease my way through so many worlds, so many lives, with some of the most accomplished people of our age. Oh, in the name of all that’s holy I have known life at its best, and experienced more than I ever imagined I would, from deep deep rivers to the wind-shaped rock formations on the sides of mountains, and there is more beauty in what I’ve seen than one can experience in ten lifetimes, and what I’ve seen is nothing, a sliver, a minute fraction of what there is to be experienced in this world, and yet we spend our time watching other people live there lives, watching other people pretend to live yet other people’s lives; we spend our time looking for the right moment or the right person or the right way to say the right thing, instead of letting the beautiful passages of truth and pure love come out of who we are as we simply live in honesty, not afraid to take a chance if we know it leads us closer to who we were meant to be. We start so pure and honest, and we go through all those firsts until we become experienced and “wise” only to find out all those firsts were the closest we ever were and ever will be to the truth of who we are.

Here’s another truth: People die of brain tumors, of heart failure, of kidney disease, they die from falling over or falling down. But first, if they were lucky, they lived. Death is not so sad if it comes after life. But lately I’ve noticed people passing away before they had a chance to live their lives at all. It reminds me of an old lyric: “Pity the poor one, the shy and unsure one, who wanted it perfect but waited too long.”

We need to stop waiting for something to happen.

The world these days is not worth the beauty that life can be. Leaders are corrupt, struggles are real, starvation is epidemic, children are being killed for no good reason at all. The world has been ravaged by waves of interference that have compromised our nerves and our focus, and we are drowning. This world leaves so many believing suicide is a viable option. Society has not nearly earned the beauty that life can be.

So I’m stepping to the side for a while. I took a few days to myself last week to finally and conclusively mourn my mother and father, my friends Dan and Dave, Letty, because I had not yet done so and because I have not yet loved the way I believe we were intended to love.

And that is a death worse than all the others.

I took a few days off last week to try and see if I could find that person inside buried beneath layers of the soot shoveled onto me from a life of almost’s and nearly’s. And I quickly understood the time I have left is a fragment of the time I’ve already wasted.

Breaks over.