Are You Really Living Your Life?

I was browing through past blog posts looking for inspiration and ran across this blog post that I wrote in 2013. That’s a long way from this post-covid world we are living in, but I thought the question is still worth asking:

Are we really living?

This quote is what kickstarted the older post:

“I don’t want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails.
I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp.
I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children.
I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone’s garden.
I want to be there with children’s sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder.
I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived.”
― Marjorie Pay Hinckley

It is so easy to get caught up in busy and forget to really live. How much of what we do is living and how much is distraction?

In my Lonesome Lawmen series, all of my characters have to answer this question over and over again. (I like that about fiction. You can ask questions you don’t have to answer in your real life.)

If it were all to end today, would you be grateful or regretful?

Have you really lived?

What would do today if you knew it was your last day?

Perilously yours,

Pauline