Get a life. A real life is not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?

    Get a life in which you are not alone. Find a people you love , and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an E-mail. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do well too, then doing well will never be enough. It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.