You Can Only Live Now

What if I start working very hard from now on? What if tomorrow I wake up and realize the importance of my school work, a good education and well paying job? I decide to do what people have been telling me to do ever since I started school. I start applying myself, I get a job that will help me support myself while I'm in college but will also create the stepping blocks for my career.  I clean up my room, throw out all my video games and comic books because they're just waiting my time. What if starting tomorrow I devote my life and time to becoming someone like the president or a important CEO? I wear a suit every day, I buy a very nice car, purchase a very nice penthouse apartment in New York, I get engaged to a smart and beautiful woman who is ready to settle down. I get a college degree from Notre Dame, I spend my free time at the Gym and I only eat the healthiest foods. What if the next day I die in a car crash? What if my guts are sprayed across the streets of some nice little neighborhood perfect for raising kids? What if my family mourns my death but no one else does because I spent so much time working hard and being a respectable person in life that I don't really have friends? Those guys I play golf with on the weekends, my best friends, were too busy going to an expensive office party with other expensive people? What if despite all my hard work it didn't change the fact that I'm now dead. What if I drove drunk that night on purpose? What if I wanted to die because I couldn't look myself in the mirror anymore? What if while I worked so hard I forgot I hate CEOs? What if I don't like golf and expensive cars parked in garages attached to nice houses? I like video games and comic books. What if I did what my teachers and grandparents told me to do? What if I was everything they wanted me to be, but not what I wanted to be? Would I still be dead, inside or out, with or without the car crash?

Luckily that's not going to happen to me, but I wonder has it happened to other people? How many stories are their about a straight A student who was killed in a accident? How many people spent their entire life working only for all of it to be meaningless when they die? Like ants working tirelessly in a ant hill oblivious to the fact that one day they will all die. "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." –(Fight Club). How many black mothers in bad neighborhoods cried because their son was a accidental death in a drive by and he was on his way to going to college. Despite all the obstacles that kid had to overcome, avoiding the gangs with their colors and guns, ignoring the countless pressure to try new drugs to help them dull old pains, only so the other people in the neighborhood could look down on him for not doing these bad things. Despite all those avoided bad ways to live your life, it was nothing more than mere chance that made his scholarship, his honor roll status meaningless. All because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the people in the car were not the most precise shooters. All the a accomplishments in the world made unnecessary because fate doesn't care what you do with your life. That would be future president, shining example of what hard work can lead to is dead while a pedophile and rapist are out in the world healthy. "Priyadarsan, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, died in a car accident on July 17. He and his roommate were driving back from Dallas and lost control of their vehicle in wet, rainy weather near Hearne. The exact cause of the accident is still unknown."-(the battalion online). A person who spent their entire life working hard so they can get a good job with a respectable pay has to finish a really hard project by a curtain day, but he can't because he has to wash his car for an important dinner party, so he spends all night working on this project. Unfortunately he over sleeps and has to rush to get ready for work, he has to get in the shower so people will not think he's dirty. He has to pick out the right suit to make a good appearance. He has to rush to work and stop at a drive thru to get breakfast, and while he rushes to work, while quickly eating his breakfast, he accidently spills hot coffee all over his expensive suit and gets into a horrible car crash and dies. This is the way the world works. This is fate and chance. Not dictated by simple emotions of man. The fact that the man worked so hard changes nothing.  
All of this may sound depressing and pessimistic but in fact it is the opposite. People shouldn't see the embeddablity of death as bad but as positive. "What would you do if today was your last day on Earth?" this is a common hypothetical scenario question. If death is random and it can happen at any time than every day is possibly the last. Why does death need to be curtain for people to actually do these things? Do they expect a warning for their death, do they expect it to happen at their conveyance. "but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."-(Benjamin Franklin). Death acts without warning or reason so people should live each day like it's their last. This fact isn't negative it is a relief. It's lets people know that their problems aren't that important and to live life free and happy and not spend it worrying about a tomorrow that may never happen. Their are parents out their mad that their child's room isn't clean so they make them walk home only to find out that while that child walks home a drunk driver lose control of the vehicle and ends that child's life. How was that child's last moment spent? The kid was mad because he couldn't play with his friends because he has to go home and clean his room, something he doesn't even considers stupid. The mother meanwhile was upset because her son's room wasn't clean, even though the state of his room it wasn't a matter of life and death, it became that because the mother decided to get upset by something that is essentially meaningless. Most of the humans in the world are getting upset over trivial and temporarily meaningless things. If the son had cleaned his room before leaving to go play than it would not change the fact that it will just get dirty again. Hours spent mowing lawns, when it could be spent having fun with friends, only for the grass to grow back. How many people spent their last hours doing something they knew would need to be done again later? My Grandma worries about the house being dirty (even though it's never a mess) in case guests come over. She doesn't want her friends to see the house a mess. What kind of friends would care about that? What kind of shallow, materialist fake people base friendship on rather or not the floor was swept to day. This is what the world is based on appearances. How people appear to be. They have to dress nice, have nice cars and well paid jobs. As if the grim reaper won't claim the souls of CEOs, but will take the alcoholic fathers who beat their wives. All this importance on appearances when in the end the only appearance everyone will all have is a corpse.  "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff...And It's All Small Stuff:"- (Richard Carlson). This is not bad news; it is a reason to stop caring about the meaningless and tedious things in life. This is the number one reason to embrace each day as your last because it always could be. "Dream as if you will live forever, live as if you will die tomorrow!"-(James Dean).
The truth is all of these pointless and tedious things that people treat important, when it is really not, are all distractions from the embeddable. Entertainment, chores, work, shopping, responsibilities, these are all things to help us ignore the fact that everything anybody does is essentially pointless. People must know and accept this and rejoice because if everything they do is pointless than there is no reason why they can't do anything. "You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted."  –(Ruth E. Renkl). People create all these reason to be depressed, stressed and miserable when they should just be happy they are alive. Do dead people worry about how their car isn't washed? People are given life and they use it for misery, never realizing that everything is what they make it. "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade" is a common phrase but what should also be said that you don't have to even take the lemons to begin with. Life is a gift and it's being used for depressing things. Worrying, depression, anger, sadness, angst, and fear are all things that are created in the mind, the one thing everyone has absolute control over. In life death is certain, so people should not waste the life given with such negative feelings, yet they do. Yet no matter how many of these quotes are heard, shared and believed, only a few people actually chose not to be unhappy. Happiness is a choice. Someone's house could be on fire and they could be the happiest person in the world. They could have just lost everyone close to them, lost everything they ever had, stair at the ruins of their life and rejoice. They could gaze on a field of graves amongst rubble of a destroyed world and still be happy because it is better to have known and lost than to have never known at all. People must stop being unhappy and make life into what they want. If tomorrow the world ends than how many people spent today, their last day on the planet upset? How many cried? How many took drugs to numb the pain? How many spent it in bars to help try to drown their emotions in alcohol? How many spent their time working on a essay when they could've been at home playing a video game that makes them smile just thinking about it? What if they knew the world was going to end tomorrow? Would they still spend their last day crying? Would they still spend the last day of their life in the bar? Would they still not be playing that favorite game? Most people believe the world could end at any moment. Most people believe it could be any day at anytime so if it does end now what did these people do on their last day? Even though most people think the end could happen any day they never act as if it could happen today. People cannot count on happiness later, and even if they could what would it matter if they are miserable now. What does food later mean to someone who is hungry now? It means nothing. Now is the only time people are given. Now is the only time everyone can live in. No one can live in the future after they get their degree from Harvard. They can only live in now. "All things that begin sweet end bitter, and everything that begins bitter ends sweet." That quote would make sense if things didn't really end when people are dead. What does it matter if someone's death was nice? They're dead. Wouldn't people rather be happy when they are alive not when they are dead? Wouldn't people rather be happy now instead of later? The truth is for most people the answer is yes. Yet people still only live for a future that is uncertain. They only live for happiness that MAY happen later. Life is only curtain now when people have it. Not later after they get their nice job. Not after I work hard on my school work so I can get a job I won't like doing. That is not happiness. People live miserably but they need to live it always happily. "Cheer up, it could be worse".