The River

Well, I've come to doubt anyone will read this, but that's alright. Sometimes, you just write for yourself, and not for anyone else. And if you happen to have an audience, that's alright too, because you give them the chance to understand a small piece of you for a time.
And really, that's all life is (sorry to my pinprick audience that has to listen to my sudden philosophical urges). You see a person in the hallway, and you smile. You laugh with your friends, hug your family, sob over your latest catastrophe, and all the while, life keeps going by at the speed of light.
There's nothing we can do about it; like a tireless river, life continues to cascade by, sweeping along everything caught within its billowing currents. Sometimes, it's all we can do just to keep afloat, and others, we feel as though we are safely kept dry in a boat. But the river will always flow onwards. That, in and of itself is reassuring. Life will go on. No matter how much it hurts, you have to go on. There will be moments that are both better and worse than what you're going through at that point in time. It's alright.
The river is also one of the greatest paradoxes ever known. Though it's reassuring that life will go on, it is moving very, VERY, fast, and sometimes, it's going on too fast for us to enjoy it. So, life will go on, but we must inversely live now, not in the distant future, or in a past we wish we could change. Because sometimes, we don't smile at someone in the hallway, we don't laugh with our friends, we don't hug our families, and we always keep our tears for later, and that's wasteful of the precious time slipping by. "Life isn't about waiting out the storm, but about dancing in the rain."
So, what's your excuse? They might reject my work or opinions, I'm too busy, I'll do it later, or something else? No matter the excuse, it doesn't matter. In life, what you don't do usually won't amount to anything, but what you decide to do can have an impact that lasts for centuries. Even if you don't become a fabulous celebrity, what do you have to loose? Nothing tried, nothing gained. And human beings are selfish by nature, so it's to our advantages to live our lives to their fullest.
Yet, so often, we let this slip us by, not realizing that we have the greatest gift we'll ever recieve in the palm of our hand. Instead, we squander it, not seeing how it shrinks and shrinks until it can no longer be seen. And then it's gone. Wasted. Useless. Nothing accomplished, nothing worth celebrating.
It's fragile, but vibrant, vivid. Life is like a river, but it's also like the most beautiful flower, or the flight of a butterfly. It's so easily destroyed or gone unnoticed, colorless, tasteless, and seemingly undetectable, when really, it acts as a mirror as you observe other lives showing what yours could be if you only choose to accept this brilliant gift.
So, live life as best you know how, without regrets for what you did or didn't do, instead, moving forward with a bright hope for the future.