Breathing to death:

It seems like a cruel irony that the times when we most desperately need to step outside the circle of clamour in order to pause and examine are the very times when it feels most impossible to do so. Things can be so pressing -- one Thing, then another Thing, and another and another and another -- that it becomes easy to forget an even bigger Thing: that this is life, and we each get only one of them. Maybe it's hard because it's important. The most important stuff doesn't usually come easily.

There's a line in a song by Lecrae which says, 'I ain't living; I'm just breathing to death.' It gives me a little shiver, a shudder of kind of unfamiliar recognition -- like I'm on the verge of finally understanding something I should have known all along.

It's terrifying, this thought that it's possible to go through life without actually living. And I don't mean living in the floaty sense of I'm-just-going-to-spend-my-time-and-money-doing-whatever-I-can-that'll-make-me-feel-happy. I mean, sucking the marrow out of life while looking outward, facing out to the people we love and up to the Creator who made us. We owe it to him and we owe it to them to live fully and live well.

Just gotta work out how to turn down the noise occaisonally and actually do that. How do you strive to be more present -- more alive?