20 Bucks

    When I got to work yesterday, I had barely eaten anything. I had woken up around six after getting to bed around one. I had been woken up by very intense pain after getting a tooth pulled, a few days ago. I took the pain killer the dentist had prescribed and another pill supposed to calm my stomach. I ate a bowl of chicken noodle soup with this, but it didn’t settle very well. I threw up and spent the rest of my time before work in bed trying to get well enough to work and not get sick again. By the time I needed to get ready for work, I managed a small bowl of macaroni and cheese, and headed off for the day.
    When I made it to work, I turned in my note for missing the few days I did and walked up to the front. Feeling physically miserable and worthless, I saw a new employee walking around up front. I figured he was one of the two new people we had hired and walked him around a bit. I went outside to get some air after a bit, and there was a man. He asked me if I had a couple dollars, he was “very hungry.” I reached in my pocket against my regular reason. I’ve watched homeless people get into knife fights over turf around the back of Lowe’s. I don’t have much sympathy usually for the people asking for money just because I’ve watched them turn down honest work for begging, since it was less work and he would end up around the same if not better just from standing there all day.
    I still pulled out my wallet to see just a twenty dollar bill, and in a moment of empathy or loss of judgment from my exhausted state, I gave him the twenty and told him to keep it. I went to lunch later and ate some chick-fil-a which sat and filled me up and I felt a lot better. I thought about that man and scrounging up change and pawning off my guitar amp at the end of weeks past, not even making it pay check to pay check. I felt that desperate for an instance and felt not gratified, but not as illogical, I was justified in some way now. This was not the only realization as I drove to school this morning. It hit me how pointless everything was and how important every second is.
    We are nothing but a culmination of atoms, left over from supernovas, the death of the stars themselves. Those atoms have happened along at this perfect instance in space and time to make up the trillions of cells in a body. Just because the brain works in congruity with the other organs and systems in a body and makes up consciousness, does not make one important or worth notice in the vast universe, ever expanding that existed around 10 billion years before the earth even formed. This also begs the importance we must place upon the one life we get. I realized that this, what I leave behind, is just as important is how I live my life and enjoy as much of it as I can. We are incredibly lucky that we live in a time where “We are ways the cosmos can know itself” Carl Sagan.