That’s the oldest, prettiest, and most dangerous lie they ever sold you. It’s the sweet, cheap poison they pour in your ear from the day you’re born, the thing that keeps you quiet, keeps you in line, keeps you from burning the whole goddamn house down.
You do not have as much time as you think you do.
Let’s do the math, you and I. I’m fifty-six years old. If I’m lucky, if I don’t get hit by a bus tomorrow or piss off the wrong woman in a bar, I’ve got maybe fifteen, twenty good years left on this planet. Fifteen years. That sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s a goddamn weekend. It’s a handful of summers. It’s the time it takes for a good dog to get old and die. It’s nothing.
And we paint ourselves this beautiful, comfortable illusion that it’s a lifetime. We tell ourselves we have time to go out and do the things we love, that we’ll get to it “someday.”
We fucking don’t.
If you are not, right now, in this ugly, beautiful, and completely fleeting moment, engaging with the things that make your blood sing, you are losing out. You are a dying man, sitting in a burning room, talking about the pretty color of the flames.
We like to think we have time. We could get hit by a bus tomorrow, and this whole stupid, magnificent, and completely absurd show could be over, just like that. The curtain comes down, the lights go out, and all the things you were going to do, all the words you were going to say, they just die with you, a quiet, pathetic little whimper in the dark.
If you want to say something to a person, fucking say it. Spit it out, even if your teeth rattle and your voice shakes. If you want to tell a woman you love her, tell her. If you want to tell a man to go to hell, tell him. The silence will kill you a lot slower, and a lot more painfully, than a punch in the mouth ever will.
If you want to go somewhere, if you want to do something, and you have the goddamn means to do it, then fucking do it. Now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not when you retire. Now. Do not delay your life because you think you have time. That time is a ghost, a mirage in the desert. It could be cut short at any given moment.
I urge you, I am on my goddamn knees in the dirt and the filth of this world, and I am begging you: live now.
Because when Death does find you—and he will, he’s a patient, quiet man who’s been watching you your whole life—he better find you fucking alive.
He better not find you in a corner somewhere, defeated by what you went through, a quiet, broken animal waiting for the end. He better not find you sitting in a goddamn recliner, your eyes glazed over, watching a movie about a life you were too scared to live, scrolling through the highlight reel of other people’s phony lives on your phone.
He better not find you wasting away in this beautiful, ugly, and completely miraculous paradise of a world that we have to live in. A world that other people, in other, shittier corners of this planet, would kill to have a piece of.
He better find you with a drink in your hand and a half-finished story on your lips. He better find you with your heart pounding from a good fuck or a good fight. He better find you with dirt under your fingernails, with a scar on your face, with the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest smell of a life that has been lived, not just endured.
Because let me just tell you, you do not have the time.
