Sha la la la la la live for today...

Scroll through my Instagram account and interspersed between an obscene number of pictures of my beautiful granddaughter, you'll find pictures of concerts, sporting events, plays, trips and a whole lot of other fun stuff. This week was particularly busy for us. :) We saw concerts on 4 of the last 5 nights. The event last night was to honor an amazing woman who passed away in February. Her husband told of how they had been married for over 24 years and had planned to do a big music event for their 25th anniversary. Instead, he ended up planning a tribute concert for his beloved wife. It was a beautiful evening with her family and friends from all over the country coming together to celebrate her life with a backdrop of wonderful music.

Cody and I have reached the age where, unfortunately, many of our friends and family members have lost their spouses/significant others. Almost every time it happens, the surviving spouse laments that they had talked about their future plans to travel or check things off of their bucket lists but they just had not gotten around to doing those things for various reasons.

My dad passed away when he was just 47 years old. It breaks my heart that he only got to be a grandpa for not even 3 years, 2 of his grandchildren were born after his passing and he had so much more life to live. Losing him at such a young age has shaped my attitude about a lot of things but especially about waiting to do those things on your bucket list.

The Grass Roots had the right idea in their song Let's Live for Today released back in 1967. (Full disclosure, an English band called the Rokes had recorded it in 1966, but I've never heard that version.) For theatre buffs, maybe No Day But Today from Rent resonates more, but you get my point. Cody and I put some things off when I was busy climbing the ladder in my career and we were raising 4 kids with busy schedules themselves. Not only were we poor, but we had very limited free time. But now that the kids are grown, we're well established in our careers and we have a little extra time, we are making the most of it and doing the things we want to do NOW. As icing on the cake, many relationship experts say that continuing to date your spouse is one of the best ways to strengthen your marriage. Yay us!

As cliche as it may sound, you really do only live once and life is pretty darn short. I hope everyone reading this will pick an item from their bucket list and start planning to do it soon. Let me know in the comments what fun things you're planning!