Death isn’t choosy.

This week saw the death of former U.K. Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. I realize a politician’s life is destined to make some unfriendly liaisons along the way, but it seems the “Ironwoman” of the UK in the 80’s did a good job at amassing many disgruntled people during her eleven year tenure.

I am not going to touch on politics here but focus more on Margaret Thatcher’s act of a few days ago. Whether a fan of hers or not, we will all do exactly the same one day. That’s a unifying aspect of dying – politics, religion, race, nationality, gender, sexual preference and the list goes on – do not interfere with the fact that all of us will ultimately close our eyes one final time. Her time as leader of the UK might not be an act we’d like to follow, but her final act, follow we will.

Of course many people died in the past few days, globally we are talking hundreds of thousands, it is the natural cycle of life, but some make headlines whereas most do not.

My last blogpost I put a link to a certain Bo Lozoff. When I checked the link to catch up on his life’s story to date, I was quite shocked to find out he was killed in a motorcycle accident in Hawaii this past November. My wife and I are great fans of his books. They have helped us on our wayward paths trying to make sense out of the conundrum of life. He was a straight-talking spiritual guy, who founded The Human Kindness Foundation, and in his sixty plus years on the planet did much work with a group of people that most others would like to forget about and move on from – convicted murderers, rapists, armed robbers, and the like.

A motorcycle accident in England quite recently took the life of a person whom I didn’t know, but was a friend to some close friends of mine. He was a talented musician, partner and father of two. A split second decision to overtake a car and he was no longer on the physical plain.

What do these three people have in common? Their humanness. Indeed we all have something in common with them and the other hundreds of thousands who have recently moved on from the physical realm – plus the seven billion who are still with us. We are all sharing the same planet, and our lives, no matter how many years they stretch, in the full scheme of things, are short.

With death out there and not really looking around and saying, “Okay, this woman made lots of enemies while she was Prime Minister, and this guy here gave his life to work with the incarcerated, oh and this guy here is a wonderful musician and has two young children – so you I’ll take, you I’ll leave around a bit longer, and you have more than half your life ahead of you so live on.” Nope, doesn’t work like that.

There is no time limit put on a life. Death isn’t choosy. It just moves on and continues to do its thing, but life keeps moving on as well. There is no life that is in vain and no matter what you believe happens after the moment of your final breath every single deed we do during our lives affects someone and everything. Every minute we procrastinate to change something we’ve been meaning to do pushes that task into a future that may never come. Now is the moment. Don’t be choosy, the right time never comes because there is always something getting in the way.  Death is something guaranteed to come, and be it a young child, a life of promise, a brand new career, talent never before seen, or a list of enemies longer than Broadway, death doesn’t procrastinate – no being choosy for this one, it knows what must get done and just does it.

We weren’t born to merely exist, equally we are not here to just blindly follow rules of someone else’s idea of living. We know deep down the importance of the natural beauty that surrounds us, the value of every human life and leaving a peaceful healthy world in our wake for future generations to enjoy. We can get bogged down in other aspects of our lives, but the reality of our importance and interconnectedness to our living planet and its inhabitants is inescapable.

Let’s all try and reach our full potential. Read through the death notices in the newspaper. When you come across the one that says, “John Doe should have died yesterday but his two daughters and wife of 15 years are grateful to still have him around. He’s going to finally follow his dream because he had a good talk with death who cut him a little bit of slack, but just this once,”  please cut it out and send it to me. Post it on facebook. Let us all see it. If you don’t come across it or something similar, don’t wait too long looking because time passes much too quickly.