Today, We Ride
Death is stalking the White Family. This makes us no different from your family; death comes for us all. Rare among us is the one who knows when the knock will come. Yet come it will. Sometimes it comes at what feels like an appointed hour, as it did this Spring for my father-in-law. Other times it makes no sense at all as when it came for a little girl who rode horses with Beth. She was taken at 12, alone in the gloaming, an unseen calamity leaving behind, well, everything and everyone. In this there is nothing special about our family. It is simply our time, our turn for Death to stalk our circle. Death takes us all, and we have very little choice about when it does.
Life, though, is a very different thing entirely. Life, you see, can be taken by the reins and ridden for all its worth. We need not sit back and let life come to us like a horse at the far end of the field. It may, come for us that is, but it just as well may not. Like that horse, though, we can go right over and get it, hop on, and ride like hell.
That’s the beauty of life. Of living. Being alive is a full-contact participatory sport. Every day you get to wake up is just chockablock filled with literally herds of horses just there for the riding. Some days you’re ready for literally anything and it’s off after that fire-breathing stallion and a gallop for the ages. Others, it’s all you can do to pull yourself into the creaky old saddle of a ancient herdy-gerdy pony barely able to put one foot ahead of the other.
No matter. You’re alive. You woke up again and you looked into that pasture at all of those horses, chose one, and started to ride.
Death may indeed be stalking us, stalking you and me, but today is not our day. Uh uh, not today. Today we are alive. We are surrounded by our people, here and everywhere. Our circle is full. Today you have your people, and your people have you. This is not a day to be “not dying”, this is a day to be living. Choose a horse. Take the reins.
For today, we ride.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2017 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.