Life Isn't a Dress Rehearsal

   Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
    Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous.
   
    And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted.
    It is easy to waste your lives, our days, our houses, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again...
    It is so easy to exist instead of to live.
      
    I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my option, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the heardest lesson of all.
    I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
    I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I　believe in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned, by telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy.
    
     And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.