Get busy living or get busy dying

Again I have that awful feeling that life is flying past me. Well, not exactly past. I sure don't feel like I've missed out on much this weekend. But another day is gone; where did it go? The whole weekend - what happened to it?! Will time ever go back to normal speed? Please, stop the ride, I want to get off!

It occurred to me that this must be what it's like to have life flash before your eyes. That in turn made me wonder whether I was dying. Right now! This very instant! Dying and detachedly, powerlessly watching my life as if someone were cueing to the end and skipping all the parts I'd been waiting to see. What if that's really what death is like? If it's not so much a lightning quick montage as a fast-forwarded flashback of your entire life? Maybe we're all just flashbacks in each other's death scenes. Creepy, eh?

But then it also occurred to me that the question isn't whether I'm dying, because that has an easy answer: Yes. We all are, every second of every day. But every second of every day, I am also living. And so it goes: we are living and dying at once. The real question is whether we allow the dying to outweigh the living and give in to this whirligig, this kaleidoscope, this accelerating gyroscope - or whether we wring the moments from each day and taste the whirling colors every second we're awake.