Lady, Sing a Song to Your Dying Daughter…

And help the rest of us put things into proper perspective.

How small we are. And how great.

Too often we live as though we are looking through a constant spyglass — things far away (and mostly irrelevant to our lives) seem huge and urgent, while our ordinary everydays can seem so small and dull. Here, a brave mom writes a song to her dying 18-year old daughter; it lands on Youtube and helps us to turn the spyglass around and discover that the big stuff is not out there.

In truth, what is out there — the headlines, the gossip, the “earth-shattering issues” that seem so imperative to us and that we (particularly we amid the internet throng) obsess over unto near-idolatry — will soon pass us by, like distant ships on the horizon, having never actually mattered to our lives at all. Something else will sail across our vision tomorrow, and once more we’ll think it’s something huge, deserving great dollops of our attention, our worry, our admiration, our passionate enthrallment…until it too slips silently away, having meant, in the end, almost nothing.

The big stuff is right here; it’s the kid standing next to my desk waiting for some attention; it’s the depressed neighbor wanting five minutes of me on the porch; it’s the spouse exhausted from a hard day, who needs to hear a good word before something else takes my attention, and day is gone, and I edge closer to my own ending, for “our life is over like a sigh/Our span is seventy years/or eighty for those who are strong. . .”

We can all do better choosing the content with which we fill our days. I know I can.

Related:
“Sadness is part of the equation”.