Stop...and Smell The Roses

Day in and day out I find myself rushing from one place to another without paying much attention to my surroundings. Going in to this past weekend was no different, making a checklist and marking off what I needed to get accomplished before Monday morning hits. So today, just like many other past Mondays, I am reflecting back on my weekend and realize that I checked many things off my list but "living" wasn't one of them. In the book, The Color Purple, Alice Walker wrote, " I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." If that is true, then I have been pissing God off a lot lately.

Why is it as we get older that we forget how to slow down and just enjoy the moment? Isn't that what life is really about? We are only here on this Earth for a short amount of time and yet we go through it wishing our lives away. Today is Monday and somewhere, someone is already wishing it was Friday. We need to start appreciating each day we have and stop dreading getting out of the bed. There are more things that are worse than having to get up out of the bed on a Monday morning. One of them is to NOT be able to get out of bed on a Monday morning. I am sure as thousands upon thousands of people dread to get out of bed on a Monday, somewhere there is a person that didn't wake up at all on Monday. Think about that for a moment.

All I want to get across in the post today is please start to slow down just a little. Just enough to know that when you lay down your head at night to go to sleep that you can smile and know that you enjoyed your life today. Tomorrow is not promised. There is someone that may not lived to see Friday and it may be you. If you see some flowers today, stop and smell them. I do not know anyone that doesn't enjoy the smell of fresh roses. If we take our time and begin to enjoy each moment we are alive then we should not have any regrets. We all need to remember that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments that take our breath away."