life is to short...

Life is too short.

   “Life is too short to be living somebody else´s dream” Hugh Hefner

      “Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.” Phillips Brooks

Life is too short.

From what I have learned this year, the quotes above are clichés. But a cliché is given the name of a cliché because it has been over used.  Some thing is used a lot because people like it or identify with it. Surely, “life is too short…” is a line that people identify with it. 

When describing Melania, Marco Polo talks a city filled with dialogue. Non-stop dialogue. When people die, the dialogue does not die with them. Instead, others replace their roles. It happens on a regular basis. So the dialogue is more important than the people. He ends the description of the city with the following line:

   “even if the lives of Melania´s inhabitants are too short for them to realize.” (pg. 22)

After reading that I truly understood the meaning behind the cliché. I have always heard people saying, especially older people, that are “wiser” because they have lived more.

I mean, how can life be short if many people live around 70 to 80 years? There are 365 days in a year, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and so on. If we make the calculations, we would end up with an enormous amount of seconds. Still after reading how fast the people of Melania are forgotten, or how easy it is for them to be of no importance I understood the cliché: “life is too short.”

In numbers, life is long but (to use another cliché) it can pass “in a blink of an eye,” because many say that “time flies when you are having fun”. (Ok. Enough clichés)

It does not matter how short or long your life is, but you only have one and you have to make it count. My sister graduated form school this year and will be leaving in less than two months. Two years ago, I could not imagine that happening, but it will. Before I know, I will be the one leaving to study, and every second that passes, I have to make them count, because if not, I will be replaced just like Melania´s inhabitants.