Immortality musings

I watched Twilight last night. Not really by choice. Dawn and her sister made me. They actually tied me to the chair and propped my eyelids open with toothpicks so I had to watch. Can you believe that? No? Fine... I'm a liar. Truth be told, I wasn't against watching it, but not all that excited about it either. I've never been into vampires, and action movies don't really do it for me either. I know, I'm a guy and I'm supposed to be into action flicks, but a lot of them have all these chases and fights and that's the whole plot. I like action to advance the plot, not to BE the plot.

So anyway, I really liked it. If you haven't seen it and want to, don't worry, you can read further. I'm not going to spoil it for you. The film goes into more of what these people are thinking and their internal conflicts than it does into car chases and fights. There are both of those, but they are secondary to the movie. Part of it got me thinking though. Just after Bella realizes that Edward is a vampire, they show him playing the piano, and doing it well. My thought was, what would I do if I were immortal? What special talent would I try to develop over the years? I know I'd want to learn to play an instrument, and learn a new language or two. But really, what I'd want to do is to be the best writer I could be. I have a love/hate relationship with writing. At the moment, this post is proving to be a little difficult for me. Don't know why. Sometimes the words just flow and I love it. Not right now.

Here's my point though. We aren't immortal... at least not as far as this world goes. In actuality, I wouldn't want to be. But why shouldn't I be living my life as if I were immortal? Why am I not doing everything I can do in this finite life to try to live up to my imaginary immortal one? Why do I waste so much time, considering I only have a limited amount of it? Time is something we cannot get back. Warning, here comes a cliche... Carpe Diem! Seize the day! We should develop our skills each and every day as if we were going to use them for all eternity. I'm still going to waste time, I know that I can't change that overnight. But I'll tell you this. I'm sure going to try harder to live like an immortal.

John