Monday, December 21, 2009

Brittany Murphy

Actress Brittany Murphy died yesterday.

The media is calling her cause of death "natural causes", although one can hardly call death at 32 natural. How sad and senseless.

Whatever her cause of death -- and I'd hazzard a guess that she may have had a heart attack as the result of an eating disorder, given some of the scarily thin pictures I've seen of her -- I'm pretty sure that she didn't go to bed thinking, "Hey, bet I won't wake up tomorrow morning."

I wonder what she would have two days ago, yesterday, last week, or this year, if she knew that yesterday was going to be her last day on earth.

What would you do?

What would I do?

For the most part, we take the miracle of life for granted. Death is something that happens to other people. Our own death, if we happen to contemplate it at all, is something for far in the future at a time when, hopefully we won't even be there for it.

We fill our heads with such nonsense. We complicate our lives. We clutter instead of simplifying. We perpetuate chaos -- rarely awakening to the truth, which is that each moment we have on this little blue-green planet is a gift to be used wisely. Not squandered.

"The trouble is, you think you have time," Jack Kornfield wrote.

Time's up.

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