Life is precious and, so often, I see people living their regrets on a daily basis. Even worse they spend their life planning their retirement when they’re still only 40! Usually life’s ‘juice’, its very core, is happening all around you NOW, but if you don’t take care you won’t notice, and it doesn’t follow that the ‘good life’ will turn up on pension day!When I was 18 I was a cub reporter. The scourge of the newsroom was ‘wedding’ reports. Would be couples used to send in a sheet of paper with all the details of their pending ceremony – time, church, date, name of groom and so on. And it was my job to turn this ‘sheet’ into prose! Then, on the appointed day, we had to ring the minister and check that the wedding had actually taken place before publishing in that night’s newspaper.
My news editor used to say ‘Look on this job as a challenge. Write your report as though it were a front page story”. That was his way of saying not only ‘do the best you can’, but also make this thing, this event, important. To the couple involved it was indeed a great moment. It was their ‘now’ life, the thing of huge importance that was happening to them at that moment. How easy it would have been to say ‘it’s only a wedding for God’s sake’. Life, as i say, happens all around you and sometimes it takes 20 years to realise that something of importance happened.
When I was in my late teens I was telephoned by my dance teacher at the time. Would I like to be an extra on a film. I said yes and did a couple of days shooting, playing the part of a dancing cardinal in a spoof movie! It was 20 years before i realised that I had become a cult movie star! The film was Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning of Life!’. Life happens NOW……seize the day my friends before it passes you by.
