Still Breathing

I’ve had several emails from kind folks who have been asking whether everything is okay with me.  Nothing has appeared on this blog since the unfortunate Mr. Spitzer back on March 12th.  Hopefully he’s doing better than he was back them.  Me, other than being busier than two toilets on nickel beer night at the stadium, I’ve been doing swell. Swell indeed.  We had the annual spring vacation, this year to Key West, along with my daughter’s senior singing recital which included a whole house full of guests from the North, and her upcoming graduation.  Business has, as they say, been booming, more so than I ever imagined. So, as you might have guessed, time becomes rather short with not enough hours in a day, yatta, yatta, yatta.  So, like those big time newspaper writers do when they go on vacation (or a bender), I’m going to run some old pieces written from my pre-blog blog called “Still Breathing” that once ran on the Ming-Kahuna web site.  The name “Still Breathing” was in honor of my Mom who when asked how she was feeling would invariably say “still breathing”.  My response to that, sure as the sunrise,  would be “What’s the alternative?”.

So, without further adieu, here is a piece I wrote back in 2005 shortly after moving to Georgia about how stability and permanency are only an illusion, but very functional ones. 

7/16/05-  As we sat in our car in the Alpharetta high school parking lot at midnight last night, waiting for the bus that was bringing my daughter home from cheerleading camp on the Florida coast, I asked my wife if, a year ago, she would have dreamed that this is where we would be on this balmy Georgia July evening.  Of course the question was rhetorical, but this got me to thinking about just how much our lives can change, and so very quickly.  I’m not talking about change due to calamity or tragedy, but how our lives can change so significantly due to the choices that we make.  They say that fate is a double-edged sword, rough-hewn at best, but I’m thinking more here about where we take ourselves in life, fate relegated to a more minor role.

 

As the bus rolled up I found myself contemplating just how finely balanced life truly is, at times  seeming so stable, an unwavering foundation upon which our lives are built, taken for granted as much so as the dawn.  And while we do walk a fine line, much as a gymnast on a balance beam, seemingly firm and stable, not prone to tilt, the truth is that this relatively broad plane that we travel during the course of our lives, is mere illusion.  The stability in life that forms the bedrock of our sanity, allowing us to go on each day with a modicum of security in a perceived status quo, is in reality more akin to walking on a razor’s edge, each of us blissfully ignorant of the precariousness of our perch.  But, walk we do each day, thankfully unaware that we are mere performers in a tightrope act called “life” where the outcome is far less than certain, or pre-ordained.

 

Such is the human condition.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.