Monthly Archives: June 2018

The miracle of life

(Note: I’ve been buried lately under new Day Job responsibilities and some life coaching. More on that in another post.)

Tribe,

I’m going to borrow a situation from my best friend, and talk a moment about life. Specifically, the miracle of life.

My best friend is an IT guy for a Big Insurance Company, and part of his job is monitoring servers. He noticed that a server managed in Omaha had dropped off the network, so he discretely emailed the sysadmin there to deal with the problem.

Well. Turns out the Omaha sysadmin had died the day before. My friend then saw that his daily calendar from The Onion had this story:

“WASHINGTON—Saying that despite the possibility you may have briefly been able to distract yourself from the incontrovertible fact by browsing the internet, hanging out with friends, reading, working out, or via some other diversion, sources confirmed Friday that you are still going to die one day and there is nothing you can do to prevent it.”

That reminded me of a line from the stage version of Peter Brooks’ The Mahabharata, where a character is asked about the miracle of life. He replies, “Each day death beats at our door yet we live as if we were immortal.”

So, yeah, you can get caught up political tomfoolery, financial scandals, trash pandas climbing office buildings, or servers going offline. But death is beating at our door.

Maybe we should take note of that and act accordingly.