Mithra-Grandchamp.

I hate those times which one can look back upon and see that they missed out on something. I feel that I have many of those. Some are specific times when I wish I had said or done something that i didn't. Others are times in which I cannot see a specific outcome had I done something, but I simply acknowledge that there could have been something great. It is from these times that we must learn to seize and grab hold of the good things in front of us.
I've been trying to read more books and all that I seem able to get into are memoirs. There's something about fiction that eludes me. It's been rare that a novel has grabbed me, save for the books by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. And I don't think it's due to a lack of imagination but the desire to find true human emotion and strife. There is something about reading another human's thoughts and questions and being able to agree or answer or even cry out, "I wonder that too!" And somehow I find those things in Tolkien and Lewis' writings. And that's not to say that fiction writing cannot do that - it most certainly does. But knowing that it's real and true adds something to it. It reminds that everyone's life has mundane moments and adventurous times and catastrophes. It reminds me that I am not alone.

So I started over Christmas break reading a book titled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Some of you may have seen the movie by the same name from a couple years ago. It's the thoughts of a man who is the victim of Locked-In Syndrome. He's is paralyzed after a stroke and can only blink one of his eyes while his mind functions properly. The book is a collection of his thoughts while in his 'diving bell' which were translated by blinks from his eyelids using a code developed by his speech therapist.
The film is wonderful and thought provoking - much like the book - in that it wakes you up to the idea that tomorrow everything could be over for you.

In one chapter that I read today, he talks about a time that he went to the races and passed up betting on the horse who won even after being tipped off that it was a sure win. Here is the last paragraph of that chapter as I feel my paraphrasing could not and would not do it justice.

Frankly, I had forgotten Mithra-Grandchamp. The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.

We only have one shot at life and it's a shame and a waste to watch it float past. All we can hope is to wake up before too much is gone because it doesn't float at all - it flies.