A Life Inventory

Not that I want to go. No, no, not at all. In fact, I'm finally learning how to really enjoy my time here, and it would be a damn shame to miss out on some cool stuff.

However, after reading this morning's ESPN special coverage on the kids of Willows, California, the idea of mortality and the chance to live life, to experience life, and to walk away from this beautiful orb of glowing passion with lessons learned, has been bouncing around my lower cranial cavity all day. You know when stuff does that? It's in the subdermal mental layer, getting digested into some form of spiritual energy, like a Snickers bar consumed on the chair lift midway through a day of snowboarding. ZING!

So, it occurred for me that it's already been a pretty noteworthy life. All the things the human animal requires to call it a 'life,' I've been blessed to enjoy. Holding a newborn as a parent, watching them develop and blossom, laughing with the depth of the heart, and making someone else laugh just as hard as they ever have, passionately loving, passionately losing, dancing until the feet hurt and the sweat stings the eyes, competing with every single charge of ATP in the molecule, crying with joy, crying with despair, protecting the weakest lives, flirting with Dionysus and having that fickle god thoroughly exact his heavy penance the next day, feeling adrenaline ignite every sense, giving and receiving the utmost pleasure, tuning into the higher power, learning to ignore the basest instinct and the joy of giving with earnest kindness.

Granted, there's much left to do. Walking my daughter down the aisle, watching my nephews play football, going on my last first date and discovering my life partner (if she truly exists), buying my firsts: boat, house, expensive watch, publishing my first novel, seeing my first screenplay on the screen, going to a Steelers game in Pittsburgh on a snowy day, holding my first grandchild, celebrating our 10 million dollar mark year, backpacking through Europe and Asia, and diving in the Barrier Reef. These are all things, though, and some of them, admittedly, are fairly shallow.

It's been a wonderful 36 years, with strife, struggle, love, laughter, pain, heartache, and joy. The universe has seen fit to provide me with so much, I hardly feel as if I deserve it. So, then, this is my accounting, the scales of balance as I see where they measure, my personal precis: It has been full.

I pray there's much more to come.