Do Bold Things

The truth of this statement, if I had to sum up my life's mission right now, is all I would need to say. There is nothing like the passing of friends, especially when they are young, it's unexpected or when they are your own age, to send you into a cerebral head-spin around a few quintessential questions. "What's it all about?" "What am I doing with my life?" 

With the first friend, in this trilogy of loss, I was hit hard, very hard. Only a few days prior we had lunch together, making girly notes of her new coif, she was the epitome of her joyous self. With one single blow, that memory was knocked silly when another friend delivered the news that she had taken her own life. I've never known someone personally who made that choice and it shook me to my core. I stared at the portraits I had taken of her and combed incessantly through her social media pages looking for answers. Between the note she left (eight pages), her two brothers' crying her history of pain during the memorial service (one they didn't fully understand until after) and a quote from Niccolo Machiavelli, which I found favorited on her Facebook page, I came to understand. Mind bending.

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”

Some people feel that taking your own life is an act of cowardliness. I disagree. I have come to view it is an act of courage. My friend, whether you agree with it or not, made a bold move. When I read repeatedly Machiavelli's quote on her page, all I could think of was that she was letting us know, right there in two lines of text, that she had taken an action of risk, calculated and chosen very deliberately, not to suffer. "There, but for the grace of God, go I." With unabashed understanding and no judgment on her choice, I cast myself forward to take in all that she no longer would. In some strange way, I felt it was my obligation, more than ever, to live a larger-than-life existence, since I am still here. Bathing in the millions of colors in the sunrises and sunsets, taking the dreams of some-a-day and doing them, quitting on the things that silence my spirit, taking flight and mingling with the clouds. Doing bold and earthly things—now.

This is not where I thought I was venturing off to with my writing today. I imagine that this commitment to one year of writing is also taking a bold course of action. I've come to understand, more fully than ever, what it means to remain gifted with this life. She and the others are a consistent reminder to do bold things—in this life I am living. In loving memory of my beautiful friend, Anamarie.

What is on your "Do Bold Things," what I like to call my "Live it List?" What are we waiting for?