Think About This by Robert Griffith

Throughout my life I have been fortunate enough to gain perspective into the many profound intricacies of our own existences. With each passing day I learn another valuable lesson about how we live, and how much we all depend on our neighbor to provide us with our emotional grounding.

While I have never wished pain upon myself, emotional or physical, I have been known to not help myself when I have gotten into dire straights. Because of the circumstances in which I have lived, I have seen my fair share of torment, desperation, and helplessness.

During a three-year period, stretching from March of 1998 until May of 2001, I spent an enormous amount of time at the nursing home where my Grandmother (and later my Great Aunt) was trapped. Think of a lonely twelve year-old wandering around amongst the frail, the hopeless, the dying, and the spiritless, and you might be able to imagine me.

I need not explain to you the details of such an exhausting, perilous, depressing, and undecidedly dark journey. Being utterly truthful with you now, I can say that those days, those long hours spent taking care of my family, helping them in their most desperate hours, was the worst time in my life.

Since my Grandmother and Great Aunt’s deaths, I have never once gone back there, to the place I simply call, “Hell.” Frequently, though, I have passed by there in my truck, hoping to see myself walking in there just so I can try to prepare my former self for the harsh realities of life.

There are times when we lose all hope, all inspiration, all dreams, and all our grips on reality. Sometimes we are in more desperate situations where we even consider the unmentionable, the unspoken. I have to admit to you that I once thought those things, but I stopped myself.

I have one person, who I shall not name, to thank for pulling me out of my despair and chamber of torture. I was lucky, because I have lived this long. I have survived, and I would like to think I’ve done well enough to be able to write an article like this for you to read.

We all need each other more than we think. For a while, a couple of years ago, you could have asked me who I could be stranded on a desert island with, and I would say, “No one but myself. I don’t need anyone else. I am the best friend I’ve ever had.” Today, fortunately, I have grown past that. I am a person of character, as are all of you, but I am also a person of education and inspiration. For you see, I look out on the world and find lessons where most find pain.

No amount of money or fortune could persuade me to change those experiences that I have had with the deepest of suffering. From each day you can seize a new lesson. The purpose of life itself is one large lesson in itself. You learn what you can, when you can, and however you can, and you apply it to life to find that deeper meaning of what it is to live.

All I ask of you is to live like there is no tomorrow. You never know what happens next?