This has become part of my daily prayer. This is the reminder I tell myself late at night, stressed out about the worries of tomorrow.
I shouldn’t be, right? Tomorrow may never come and we never know what’s around the corner. I know that better than some of us. And still, worry and stress are my frequent companions.
A couple of days ago I was doing a personality test and there was a statement to which I had to choose a number on a scale from 1 to 10 (least applies to most applies). The statement read: ‘I can relax easily when I want to’. Jeez… how do I answer that? Is my daughter with me? Then no. Is she away? Who’s watching her? I can’t relax completely if she’s not with me (anything can happen at any given time, like any other mom would tell you). The question got me stressed out.
Starting with the school that my daughter will need to go to (next year, mind you) and the new apartment I’ll need to find for us (close to school, of course) to wondering if I’m meant to stay single for the rest of my life and the amount of work that awaits me the next day, my nights have become a real chaos.
‘What if I die tonight?’ – I ask myself.
And just like that I smile, I breathe out the longest breath, the weight disappears from my shoulders. I relax.
‘If I die tonight, my last thoughts will be of my daughter, who is right here next to me. Because she is the most precious in my life. If I die tonight, I can say life is beautiful, because I am here living it’.
At first I found it scary – why do I need to think about death in order to appreciate life? But is it really so wrong? Life and death are parts of the never ending cycle, and without one you can’t appreciate the other. Knowing my life can end this very moment puts my thoughts back on track.
A book I read recently made a big impact on me.
I am not a big fan of self help books. And this is not one of those books. It’s a book that dares you to be brave and say what you think. Life’s simply too short not to speak your mind.
I wanna state for the record that the author’s use of the word ‘dope’ was too much for me. I was interested in what Luvvie had to say about being brave, but I found it a bit annoying to read ‘dope’ in almost every other page of the book. Apart from that, it hit home.
To me, being ordinary is the equivalent of boring. To me, gray is the most boring color out there. To me, average is worse than the extreme of any given range.
Luvvie encourages you to be ‘too much’. If somebody calls you too (anything), it just means that the room you are in (or the audience) is too small for all (whole) of you. You just need to find a bigger room.
‘You are too clingy’, – London boy announced after I came back form London. Imagine – I had to feel some part of him at any given moment. I had to touch him to know he was real. This is how big my need to be close to him was. That rarely happens. I had the same need to touch Beno, always, anything and everything, any part of him. To me, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s who I am, it’s not too much.
I brushed off the remark. Then I quoted some pages to London boy. The book has an entire chapter on how TO BE too much (too anything and everything).
Speak your mind, speak the truth, be bold. Sure, don’t be reckless. If doing so leaves you hungry and homeless, literally, don’t do it. But if it helps somebody, including yourself, go for it.
So why hide how I feel about a man? Why not remind myself that when I’m gone, the only one remembering that I worked so hard or stressed out so much (sometimes without a reason) will be my daughter? Even now, reading her bedtime stories, she identifies me with the character that works too much. ‘Just like mama’, – she says.
‘If I die tonight’… I breathe out… and I smile.