Coming Clean (2005)
People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly. ― Andy Warhol
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Late March, 2005, I was preparing for my move to Indiana when a young woman approached me about taking some nude pictures. Her one requirement was that they all be framed and processed so as to keep her identity anonymous. She had recently graduated from a prominent university with her Juris Doctorate, would be sitting for the bar the next week, and had an internship at a prominent human rights organization. I couldn’t help asking, given the direction her life appeared to be going, why she would risk taking any nude pictures at all. Yes, they would be sufficiently anonymous, but should anyone ever see or find her copies of the photos it could be just as detrimental to her career. Her response was nothing I expected.
“How can I defend the rights of other people’s lives if I have no knowledge of how to live myself?”
I have long since forgotten the young lady’s name, so I’ve no idea where her path has taken her, but her statement has stuck with me. Her insight at such an early point in her life was astonishing. Too often, especially when the intent is good, we become so concerned about what other people are doing that we pay little or no attention to the fact that our own life is passing us by. We reach middle age, or later, realize that the flexibility of our youth is gone, and try to compensate with the time we have left, not knowing how much time that may be.
While millennials have been roundly criticized by their predecessors as being too slow to grow up and take responsibility for their lives, perhaps they have more sense than their elders did in their twenties. Young adults today are more likely to postpone marriage and families and long-term responsibilities for one primary reason: they want to experience life before doing so becomes an act of chasing old regrets.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]We have expanded the longevity of life to the point where it is now reasonable to expect a fair number of people to live past the century mark. 65 is no longer the old age marker that it was a mere thirty years ago. Yet, we have to ask ourselves what good it does to exist for longer periods of time if we continually put off learning how to actually live that life? What good does it do us to argue over when life begins or ends when we completely ignore the quality of the substance between those two points?
Time is not nearly on our side as much as we may think. Accidents have always been a risk as long as humans have existed, but an increasing risk is what we are doing to ourselves. Just yesterday, a 24-year-old reporter and a 26-year-old cameraman left television station WDBJ for what they thought was a routine interview, shot live for the station’s morning show. They had no way of knowing their lives would be taken from them on-air. Later yesterday, in Sunset, Louisiana, the lives of a mother and a police officer were unexpectedly cut short. The United States has now had more mass shootings this year (247) than there have been days in the year (238). That we are the only Western, allegedly civilized, country to have such a problem is damning.
I firmly believe that people who understand how to live life neither interfere with nor take the lives of others except as a legitimate act of self-defense. People who learn how to live do not threaten the lives of others. While there are no one-word or single-action solutions to any of the social problems we face, there is something to be said for removing oneself from the mayhem and focusing on living one’s own life. Don’t just learn to live a little; learn to live a lifetime. One never knows what day opens the last page. Embrace each moment. [/one_half_last]
Dust On The Trail
Dust On The Trail. Model: Lisa Petrini
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. ― George Bernard Shaw
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Death can be a difficult issue to discuss with children, especially when it comes to family members. One moment, you think they have a grasp of it, then later, seemingly out of the blue, the topic comes up again with new questions that need to be answered. With a five- and a six-year-old around the house, the subject comes up surprisingly often, sometimes in ways we weren’t expecting. Trying to figure out how best to respond to those questions and situations is a mixture of wiping tears and trying to not laugh at the wrong time.
We were driving past a mortuary and its large cemetery one afternoon when Baby Girl pipes up and informs us that this was where her pre-K teacher, Miss ‘Nay, works. When questioned as to why her teacher would work at a cemetery, the little darling responded without hesitation, “That’s where she puts the people she doesn’t like.”
Miss “Nay was horrified to hear of the exchange. She’s a jolly, pleasant woman who does a great job with children, but might be a bit superstitious. “I can’t stand dead people,” she told us. “I don’t even go to funerals.”
More frequently, and certainly with less humor, it is Little Man who raises the subject, frequently in tears over the loss of his great-grandmother a couple of years ago. Trying to explain to him that people don’t live forever and that his great-grandmother had lived a long life does little to appease him. She’s not here now, and that’s what counts. At other times, though, he can look out across a cemetery and explain that once one has expired that, rather than becoming dust, our bodies become tree seeds that grow new forests. While perhaps missing a biological step or four, that perspective of a renewable life is certainly less traumatic and easier to discuss.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Growing up in rural Oklahoma, and especially the son of a minister, death was such a normal part of life for us that we were almost callous about it. After all, we played and ran in large fields where it wasn’t unusual to come across whole sun-bleached skeletons of cows. The general opinion of ranchers at the time was to only remove a cow carcass if it was diseased and posed a health risk to the herd. Coming across skulls in the dust just wasn’t that uncommon.
Western philosophies have evolved over the past couple of generations where we no longer see death’s natural role in the life cycle. Instead, we see that passing from life to dust as the ultimate unfairness, the unjust removal of someone important to our lives. We expect explanations where there are none to be had and look to blame people who are not genuinely at fault. In matters of violence that should never have happened, our sense of outrage stems from our own sense of privilege that the deceased should never have been taken from us; a warped sense that it is we, more than the dead person, who have been short-changed.
Today is the thirteenth anniversary of my mother’s sudden and very unexpected death, a mere six months and four days after my father’s passing. I was living in Atlanta and one of the challenging decisions we had to make was whether the boys should go to their Mema’s funeral. To do so would mean them missing the first two days of school, but to not take them would deny them the emotional closure we thought they might need. We left the decision up to them. They opted to not go. As one of them put it, “We’ve been to enough funerals this year.”
Life is a wonderful thing, but sooner or later we all become dust on the trail. Love now. Live now. Find peace. Embrace the full cycle of life, even when it seems unfair.[/one_half_last]
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