I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
In Ray Bradbury’s 1957 novel Dandelion Wine, 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding discovers that he is alive.
This simple fact—that I am alive—is one that rarely affects me as deeply as it should.
One of my deepest fears is that I might wake up one day and feel that I have been sleepwalking through life. Time flies, and looking back, my life is a mosaic of roads taken and not taken. When faced with a simple choice—to make or not make the bed, to share a meal with those new friends I made or stay home, to ask that girl out on a date or bear that nagging sense of what if—I have been tasked to choose, conscious of its weight or not, what I should regret less.
Since finishing Dandelion Wine, there are two apparent truths about my life which have been so miraculous, so transformative, that I wake up each morning brimming with joy:
- I am alive.
- The God who created flowers, rivers, mountains, spiders, whales, butterflies, clouds, stars… that same God created me and loves me… loves me.
Each morning, on my drive to work, I’ve been incorporating a little exercise: I try to make myself aware of the various little miracles which have occurred, and are occurring, each day. That I woke up means that while I was unconscious and asleep, my heart worked to circulate blood throughout my body. That I can breathe means that my lungs are intact and working properly—I would otherwise die in a matter of minutes. That my eyes let me gaze at the trees and the blue sky, my ears to tune into that new song I discovered, my taste buds to enjoy my morning coffee, my mind to ponder who God is; that He is. I can go on and on.
Put simply, I try to absorb the weight of being alive. To remember that with each new day, I am given another chance to rise into the person I hope to be.
Because there is no guarantee that I will not wake up tomorrow. That I won’t wake up blind, or deaf. That I might not cross the street and get ran over by a drunk driver on an otherwise peaceful afternoon. That a meteor might not fall and land precisely on my right knee, causing me to lose a limb forever. That a chemical accident might not permanently alter my facial features (which I have become rather fond of).
There are a myriad of things I take for granted all the time. In the words of Joan Didion, life changes in the instant; the ordinary instant. Among my recent reads, it’s a truth which has been expressed painfully and beautifully in her book The Year of Magical Thinking upon suddenly losing her husband to a cardiac event, and by Yiyun Li in Things in Nature Merely Grow upon losing both of her teenage sons to suicide.
Engaging with such heavy stories reminds me that nothing in this world can ever fill me; that the things I place my joy in can be taken away in a moment’s notice.
Then I begin to wonder… if that is true, why bother waking up in the morning to face the day? After all, life is riddled with suffering and rife with mild inconveniences. If nothing I do in this world will ever amount to anything that brings me lasting fulfillment, why should I go on living?
As always, and despite my persistent doubts, I return to the only satisfying answer for me, and that has been the deep love and abounding grace of God. To believe and to know that everything is grace changes everything; that nothing I have, nor plan for, nor accomplish—none of it is of my own making. All of it is grace, granted by the God who is sovereign and in total control of all things. In this profound truth I am able not only to move forward in confidence, but to thrive in the present regardless of what happens.
John Piper, in his sermon titled “Don’t Waste Your Life”, presents this case much better than I ever could. It is only in the lens of an all-consuming grace and deeply-satisfying love of a God who is transcendently pure and exceedingly great, that anything in this life—that my life—can have even the slightest weight and purpose.
I was reminded of this just recently. This year marks my second attempt at applying to PA schools. Yesterday, I was waitlisted from a PA program I really wanted to attend. And I’m quite far down that waitlist. And I flew out for that interview and felt like, finally, everything was coming together. So after yesterday’s news, I was disappointed, but not crushed. If this had happened a year ago, I would have been sent down into a death spiral—back then, I was so preoccupied with feeling behind in life, like a bum who couldn’t get anything right. But oddly enough, I am filled with peace. If I don’t make it in this year, I can try again next year. And until I die, as long as I wake up each morning, I can trust that He is not done with me yet. I just have to get up, seek, and knock until I find what awaits me.
So I don’t want to waste this one life I have been gifted. I want to glorify He who gave me a reason to live, and a means to thrive. And I hope that no one I care about ever wakes up one day and feels like they have squandered this precious life.
I want to feel all there is to feel. I want to embrace the happy, the sad, the tired, the angry, and never forget, until the day I die, that I am alive. I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
And in writing and sharing these thoughts, it is my hope that you don’t, either.
