Sometimes life doesn't feel real. You wake up in the morning, shower, brush your teeth and maybe get some coffee. You stumble into your car in the garage. Next thing you know, you're pulling into the parking lot at work. You aren't really even sure how you got there -- you can't remember a thing. Or maybe you're reading a book, sitting in your favorite chair or enjoying a cappuccino at a nearby cafe. Suddenly you find your eyes have moved to a whole new page. You have no idea what you just read. Three or four minutes have gone by and you don't know where they went.
But other times life is extremely and immediately present. You're crossing the street and a car screams past you, inches away from your body. Suddenly, your heart is beating a million times a second. Everything is crystal clear: the color of the leaves, the feeling of sunlight on your skin. Your pupils are comically dilated, you feel a sudden surge of adrenaline deep in the pits of your stomach. Or another time: it's night on Christmas eve. You're looking out the window at the lights of your hometown. Snow blankets everything, you can see tiny flakes against the headlights of the tiny little cars driving along the streets you grew up on. You're overwhelmed with memories: the way the desks shined in the sunlight on your first day of school, kissing your high school girlfriend at the park, the way a baseball sounds when it's hit, the smell of your mother's breath when you sat on her lap as a child. A million things all at once.
So we walk through life on a tightrope, oblivion on one side and eternity on the other. Do you determine where you fall? Or will the wind be the one to blow you over?