Story #5: LATER

LATER

This tweet reminded me of the finality of life.

This week, I’m not writing a story. Sometimes, real life is a better story. At this exact moment, I’m sitting at home in North Cyprus, so far away from my family and missing them like crazy. My parents aren’t exactly spring chickens (Mom, I know you are going to read this, and I love you!), and if I’m being honest, I worry so much about them.

I think, during this period of time, with so much death around us, it’s important to take a step back and appreciate the little things in life. The fact is, death is inevitable. Every second of every day, someone is dying. However, this pandemic has put a lot of things into perspective for me.

For me, what started as a vacation from responsibility and commitments only became real by the third week of lockdown on the island. People were dying. Of course, death happens every day, and the victims whose lives were claimed by the virus did have pre-existing conditions—however, the virus ultimately caused their deaths.

The novel coronavirus doesn’t discriminate. In some cases, relatively healthy twenty-somethings are dying for it, while geriatric patients are surviving it. But we shouldn’t dwell on that. Being in isolation during this period can make a person claw the walls, but remaining productive can keep that from happening.

What is it that you’ve been procrastinating? What have you been telling yourself you’ll do later? What if later never comes?

So take a minute. Write a list of things you need to do, or want to do. Are they doable during quarantine? How long will they take to do? Checklists usually help keep things organized.

Keeping a diary can be important, too. It can help keep you sane to be able to have a place where you can jot down your ideas, your feelings; basically, anything that’s going on with you. I haven’t kept a diary in ten years, but I recently started one. Writing down what’s going on with me has helped me in the past, and I think it could be practical now.

There’s also an amazing site that you should definitely check out called futureme.org. It's a site that allows you to send an email to your future self. It's especially helpful if you have goals you want to achieve (Dear Future Self, did you finally write that book you were meaning to start?), or if you want to remember how you were feeling at a particular moment and want to be able to look back and see how far you've come. I'm expecting an email from myself to arrive in 2025. It'll be fun to look back and remember what life was like in 2020 in self-isolation.

That being said, it’s still important to remember that life truly is short. You don’t know when your time is up, and you don’t want to regret not doing the things you always thought you’d get to do later. The truth is, later often ends up being never.