Gift

Spending a good deal of time on planes, I followed with particular interest the recent Southwest Airlines incident that resulted in the death of a passenger.  Reading accounts from the passengers and crew feels sort of like gawking at an automobile crash on the opposite lanes of traffic as I pass by, uninjured, car intact.  Having been on a few Southwest planes over thirty plus years of travel, it is sobering.  But the one word that keep bubbling to the top is “fragility,’ as in “the fragility of life.”  Life has its bumps and bruises, its breakups, crashes, and tearing aparts.  As such, it is easy to start to think of life as something other than fragile.  It becomes easy to think of it as a rock, not an egg, a sheet of steel, not a pane of glass.  It becomes easy to start seeing life as an entitlement, not a gift – but a gift it is.  It occurs to me that perhaps the best way to honor those who pass before me is to treat life as the gift that it is.