Life is a dance that you keep dancing while you live.
The steps are difficult and hold your attention ransom.
So, often, you do not see the beauty of its pattern and flow,
Until you are so old and slow that you can barely take the next timely step.
Life is an exercise of making meaning and value of all that you are given.
The factory in which you make that life is only rarely comfortable.
Loud and grouchy managers provide the materials unfairly and with austerity,
And they constantly interfere with your work and make your hammers dull.
Yet, at the end of the job, you will marvel at what you have made.
Life is an operatic performance, full of color, flashy swirls of movement, and arias hard to sing.
And you will strut and fret your hour upon the stage, terrified you’ll miss the high note,
And fear of your inevitable solo will freeze the butterflies in your guts into sharp and painful fears.
And some fat lady in a Viking helmet and chainmail flits about trying to sing the notes that bring the opera to its end.
And when you belt out the song at center stage that is meant to bring the house down, and the audience applauds,
You will fall back exhausted, confident that it was your best possible performance, and worth your life to perform it.
Life is awesome… but painful.
Catch a Falling Star 