This morning, twitter alerted me to the news that eight people had been shot in downtown Orlando.

Obviously, this news was shocking and bizarre.  And, of course, sad.

It was particularly sad for me to read about it because something similar, if not even more horrific, had happened the day before.

There’s a lot of ways a blog post about this incident could pan out.  We could discuss gun control, mental health, a distressed economy or some permutation of them.

But, really, the only thing that keeps playing in my head has to do with how the people who walked into the Gateway Center’s eighth floor had no clue of what an incredibly bad Friday they were about to have.

It’s a pretty trite perspective, I know, but that’s all I can seem to think about.

Being human is so … hard, isn’t it?

Animals and plants have it easy.  Nourishment, shelter and reproduction.  There are no complicated nuances.  Any complications generally arise as the result of our complications bleeding over into their efficient existence.

But us humans?  We’re complicated creatures.

I keep wondering about the two people who have been reported dead.

Who were they?

And, my God, why them?

Why not you?  Or me?

I don’t mean that it should have been me or you, I mean, it could have been me or you.  Easily.

We lock our doors, look both ways before we cross the street, take our vitamins, eat right… and we think that this is going to make a huge difference.  The truth is that it makes only a little difference.

I’m wondering about those two people… reports are preliminary right now, so we don’t know anything about them.

I’ve got these sappy movie scenes playing out in my head.

Like, a pretty, middle aged woman slams the door shut and makes sure she mutters, “Jerk” in earshot before she gets in her car, pointedly refusing to say good bye to her husband after the argument they just had about who was going to take their son to soccer practice… or maybe she got in the car, put the keys in the ignition, sighed deeply and then went back in the house and yelled, “Hey, I’m mad, but I love you, OK?”

Some single twenty something guy stumbles into the kitchen, makes some coffee and then trudges out of the door feeling a slightly numbed despair as he realizes he hates his crap job… or did he jump out of bed and greet the morning with joy and purpose, knowing that whatever he was going to do today was really going to mean something to him?

And, let me get really morbid and ask, what words spin in one’s head as they lay on the floor bleeding to death because of someone else’s complete madness?

“This can’t be happening… is this really happening… I’m not done here…Oh, God, is this really happ…. “

The End?

I would imagine that it would play out that way.  I don’t think in a situation like that most people are evaluating whether they’ve lived a good and meaningful life.  I would imagine you cling to the hope that this is not it.

There has to be more.  Please let there be more.

I don’t know about you, but I’m done living for that last moment as of right now.

It gets bantered about quite a bit, this idea of “When I die, I want to know that my life meant something.”  I figure we spend the majority of our time and energy trying not to die, so I imagine in that moment, I’m going to be too scared to make sense of anything.

The fact is that every single moment in our lives means something.  Every single second, actually, and we consciously choose what each of those seconds mean.

Or whether they don’t mean anything at all.

In the end, we are not who we are in the last moment of our lives.

We are who we are right now.

It’s not “When I die, I want my life to have meant something.”

It’s, “As I live, I’m making this moment mean something.”