Sell/Use by: ____

A few weekends ago I went over to a friend's house for the evening for champagne, homemade tiramisu (courtesy of moi), and to exchange a few stories from last year.  She just got out of a good relationship, and to be quite honest so did I (well--it feels like "just"), but the one conspicuous similarity between the two is that there was a time limit on both.  An expiration date that hovered in our periphery the whole time, that sometimes squeezed the breath out of my lungs with its inevitability, but still hauled us off toward happiness.

That horrible, hovering inevitability could only be disregarded when I consciously decided to make the most of my time left in Edinburgh.  When I got up at a reasonable hour and decided that instead of hanging around and being useless all day, I'd drag someone I wanted to spend the day with to the botanic gardens, or to a movie and then for a pint, or--you get the point.  The deadline-related panic only abated when I spent my time doing something fun with a friend.

Consciously deciding to make the most of your day, though, doesn't apply only to romantic relationships.  The world could be caving in, but we're still surrounded by people who love us and who we love in return.  We shouldn't forget that, even if we're not surrounded by all the people we love at present.

What I'm getting at is that life is a lot happier when we live as if we have an upcoming expiration date (even when we don't)--an expiration date that we've decided to disregard so we can make the most of what's left of our fleeting butterfly lives.

It's difficult, and sometimes requires an excessive amount of optimism.  I won't try to deny that.  But it's worth it.  We can find small bursts of laughter in more places than we're willing to believe, and those amusements build up into something resembling a happy life.  It's worth it.