photo courtesy of Twitter

What a day. I was at a local graduation ceremony when a friend informed me of the passing of Anthony Bourdain. What a complete shock. This guy, by all accounts had his shit together. Fame and notoriety were all at his fingertips, but something apparently was missing in his life. The irony of being at a ceremony of children moving on to another phase of their lives with boundless optimism and hope, while one man a world away had lost all his, and decide life was not worth living was not lost on me. Many people will judge him. Many people will mourn him. Some will even mock him. Empathy people! This man battled the demon of addiction at some point in his life and appeared to have conquered the addiction, but not what caused it in the first place. I sat there looking at all those kids. The family members who clapped with joy and beamed with pride, all the while knowing that some kid in that group or person in the stands has felt the way that he felt at some point in their lives.

We all have had those moments where life didn’t seem fair. Circumstances didn’t turn in our favor. Being rejected by someone or a group. Being abused or bullied by a stranger or even someone who was supposed to love us. Those scars run deep. They seem to never heal. One little speck of a memory can bring it all flooding back with such force, it makes you relive it all over again. A “trigger” is what they call it.

I know most of my posts have been about my life and my business, but this really was a “gut punch” moment. I didn’t agree with some of his methods, but the guy was talented. He knew what he wanted and how to go about getting it. It always seems that those are the ones that have all this ability, but it seems to come at a price. I just said “write about it”.

I was thinking about all the people that I have known in my almost 50 years and how there were a few that decided that this was best way for them at the time. One was a day before graduation from high school, another was a coworker who battled addiction, another was a friend of my families that I had known almost my entire life over a divorce. The last and most shocking was the “guy” from my high school that everyone loved and adored. Depression isn’t bound by sex, race, economics or ethnicity. It doesn’t care whom it destroys or devours.

  Talk. That’s always the tweet isn’t it. This righteous indignation of armchair psychology that talking is all that is needed to fix that person. It doesn’t work that way for everyone. If one word can supposedly save someone, then don’t you think that one word could destroy someone as well. Think before you speak. Smile, listen and comfort when asked or don’t wait to be asked. Be observant of the people around you. If we wear our hearts on our sleeves, then we wear our souls on our faces. Look up from your phones. Experience your life instead of tweeting it or taking a photo. We all are born with the need to be wanted and loved. Remember that. God gave that to us. That is our spark. That was initially placed in us to love him, then he made another person for us because he saw it wasn’t enough. God Loves You. He Loves Me. His love is to be given freely to others by us. We are all not worthy of it, but he gives it anyway. His greatest commandment was to love others as I have loved you.