Friday, March 7, 2014

Every Frown Robs A Kiss--The Law of Material Stress

If you could subject any human moving part to the testing that consumer products go through to determine the number of beats, grabs, bites, gulps, pushes, pulls and winks it had, you would find that our materials, like all materials, have a finite number of flexes. Granted, that number is extended by replacement and repairs, but even those mitigations by the very nature of their own movements have their life time limits.

The trick is to match the movement of your being with the potential of the moments and seasons of your life so that all is fully realized, and to do so neither too soon nor too late. Some are too late, never experiencing their potential when death and disease take them due to disuse and disregard. Some too early who push beyond the boundaries of possibility and are obliterated by folly and excess. The few, maybe the lucky, find their potential, sustain it and are worn out evenly like a morning mist dissipating all at once beneath a rising sun.

And at the end of life, some want to die peacefully in their sleep and some with enough drama they are assured they won’t die alone. Me, my goal is to last out my days so that all the parts are working, rising, striving together like that same mist moving up the mountain and then you blink and it is all gone together--neither the heart, the knees, the lungs, the mind nor the soul having out-lasted or out mettled the other. I want to dissipate, disappear, melt away, with all the well worn tissues leaving hand in hand in a single bow of grace just before a single final curtain call.

Until then, the reality is that we really do have only so many dances, so many smiles, so many kisses to give that can only be diminished by the flexes of our number of fist fights, scowls and curses. Not that an occasional curse is unwarranted nor unnecessary–but love is fleeting and life truly is short, so spend it frowning only when absolutely necessary, for with every frown you rob a kiss you could have given and one you could have received. So on this day I give you not a fist but a kiss.

Loren M. Lambert © December 3, 2013

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