Thursday, June 27, 2019

Every Frown Robs A Kiss (The Law of Material Stress)

If you could subject any human moving part to the testing through which consumer products go 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 lifetime 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 do this neither too soon nor too late. Some are too late, never experiencing their potential when death and disease takes them, due to disuse and disregard. Some of these movements are realized too early, pushing beyond the boundaries of possibility, causing obliteration 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.

Some want to die peacefully in their sleep, and some wish to die with enough drama they are assured they won’t die alone. 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.

On this day, I give you not a fist, but a kiss.

Loren M. Lambert © December 3, 2013

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