The End of Days - Yours, Mayan, and Ours

As you may already know, tomorrow is the last day of life on Earth as foretold by the Mayans. This is not to say that our spirits won’t continue to exist on some ethereal plane, or that our mortal frames won’t continue to exist as space debris after our planet explodes, but life as we know it – with our souls firmly rooted in our breasts and our appendages all attached and uncharred - is about to end. Let us all take a moment and flip the freak out.

 AAAAAHHHHHOLYCRAPWEASELS!!!

Now, pull yourself together. We’ve only got a day to live, and daggumit, we’re not going to spend it rocking in the corner and sucking our thumbs. It’s time to grab Life by the stretchy part of the elbows and headbutt its teeth! Let’s all spend this last day doing everything we always wanted to do, like breaking windows and setting things on fire! Who’s with me?!

Wow, you guys really didn’t need that much convincing. I was just kidding.

Although it would no doubt be fun to hurl an office chair through a giant pane of glass Die Hard style, all the real things most of us want to accomplish can’t be done in a day. Or a week. Or a month, even. One could argue that we are still young, and it’s normal to not have accomplished everything we’d like to by this point in our lives, but I would like to argue that if we’re looking at percentages, the Mayan statisticians say our lives are 99.9999% over. And although we’ve known about the world’s impending doom for several years now, we are still unprepared. Sure, we meant to do all those things on our bucket lists, but the television was on, and what were we suppose to do, not watch it? Oh, if only our encyclopedic knowledge of Jersey Shore could save us from certain destruction instead of help usher in our untimely demise!

I am, of course, calling myself out first and foremost. If there’s one thing I’ve learned too late, and I’m not quite certain there is, it’s that I can’t sit idly back and expect great things to happen. I can’t reasonably expect anything to happen unless I set something in motion. For example, if I want a new job, I have to apply for it and then physically wrestle into submission every candidate in the waiting room before the interview. Also, shouting “I want to be an astronaut!” doesn’t have any weight while I’m watching Apollo 13, but people would be inclined to take me seriously if I was shouting it out of a rocket window.

“Mission control to Nathan. Do not open that rocket window.

You’re going to kill everybody. Over.”

I have to be proactive, and I have to think long-term. I have realized this in retrospect several times, and if history is as tenacious as everyone says it is, I will keep realizing it. Well, until a race of angry lizard humanoids eradicate us from the Earth tomorrow (Did the Mayans say how the world’s ending? I’m just throwing out some guesses here).

So how did I get where I’m currently at, reassessing my decisions while holding an umbrella in a futile attempt to protect myself from tomorrow’s forecast of ‘cloudy with a high chance of torrential buffalos’? I remember one of my teachers in the youth program at church explaining this concept on the blackboard by drawing life as a horizontal line. The line would abruptly slant upward and downward, and the crook of each angle represented a decision made. It was to demonstrate the impact of righteous and unrighteous decisions, but its application spreads to all aspects of life. Practiced violin for an hour? Line slants up. Used that hour to chase squirrels instead? Line slants down. Every decision sets you on a certain trajectory, and you can follow that decision tree backwards to find out how you became a concert violinist or a lunatic with a dead squirrel collection.

I’m going to love you and squeeze you and call you George.

…George, get back here! Why won’t you love me?! George?!

Sometimes it is easier to see life as a daily vignette instead of a seamless movie with a beginning, middle, and end. And choosing to look at it the easy way is, well…easy. And that’s how I find myself apprehensive on the eve of the day gravity dramatically increases and all our organs get crushed under the weight of our own bones (Possibly. Again, the Mayans were pretty vague).

So, I’ve chased a few squirrels. But should the Mayans be wrong – they have never lied to me before – and I wake up on the morning of December 22 still clinging to existence, maybe I’ll try a little harder. Maybe I’ll do something productive that could have bearing on my future. Or maybe I’ll just take a breather, because realizing I need to be better is half the battle, and I just escaped the Mayan rapture, and hey look the television’s on!

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”

Or, one day soon we’ll wake up fat, hungover, and disappointed. Whichever.