Life is short but it’s wide
I think the thing about so many deaths and illnesses being the main topic of summer when it was supposed to be the summer of a birth is that it makes you become a miser of your time and you start counting up your years and your possible years left and those around you and their years left and soon before you know it you have this very limited view of the world.
The Mayans believed that you could live many lives within one lifetime and I know that I have. And sometimes when I’m lying awake at night before going to sleep I feel as if those lives line up symmetrically and make me deeper, wider, and heavier in a good way.
Recently though I’ve been waking up with nightmares near about every night because it seems in each of those parallel lives there is a crack and something as profound as possibly losing your mother seems to pry open each of those cracks and expose the underbelly of those short but well lived lives and that’s when it gets scary.
What if? You say to yourself.
Well, last night as I lay whimpering in the midst of yet another nightmare, I thought about the upcoming high Jewish holidays and how Yom Kippur is when you forgive others and ask forgiveness, but it’s also a time to forgive yourself.