Thanks to a re tweet, I chanced upon a wonderful blog post by Anirban, entitled Driftwood.  In it, he shares a very personal account of how we cope with the tragedies of our lives.  It was beautifully written and poignant, almost poetry in prose form…

And so the waves come crashing down on us. With marriage. With graduation. With a job or a promotion. On buying a house. With the first steps of an infant. With the scaling of every personal Mount Everest.

There is no unalloyed joy in this world, no hope, no freedom, no solace – once you have lost someone you truly love.

Anirban’s words will ring true for many of us.  Yes, we all have our own unique ways to cope with our losses.  But, in the end, we are all united in the truth that there’s not much we can do about it…

On weekends you call relatives up. Just as they state the plain truth that they are getting older, you either bluff your way through the conversation by telling them that nothing will ever happen to them or you berate them for not taking better care of themselves. The deception and the anger are your strange way of compensating for the impotence of not being able to do anything at all.

One day you are speaking to a loved one. The next day he or she is gone forever. You know that tomorrow it could be someone else. And the day after, it will be someone else. And one day it will be you.

Driftwood was an affirmation of my belief that Life should be lived to the fullest, every single moment!  That, we cannot choose our circumstances, only how we react to them.  That, all things come to an end, good and bad.  That, all we need is love.