"I suppose it is possible...

...to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age." --Ernest Hemingway

I'm reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for the first time, and it's reminding me of why Hemingway is my favorite author to read. Chapter Thirteen has one of the best descriptions of love that I've ever read paired with a meditation on quality of life and trying to get the same out of seventy hours that you'd hope to get out of seventy years. That's some good stuff, and it's serving as my motivation for the day.

Why not try to get seventy years' worth of life out of every seventy hours? It might be tough to keep this pace up for long, but I think it would be admirable to try. I've always been of the opinion that really living life is about experiencing everything it has to offer, the ups and the downs, and this fits right in with that. Since we never know how long we've got, we might as well try our best to cram as many of those experiences into as short a time as possible. So what if we age quicker because of it. I know I wouldn't care much to die a few years earlier at the expense of having lived a life full to the brim with experience. Hell, I think I'd trade ten years of floating along for one year chock full of everything I wanted to do.

The cliche that comes to mind from my days as an athlete is "leave it all on the field," which basically translates into holding nothing back and giving it everything you've got while you've go the chance to give it. And so, with Hemingway's Robert Jordan as my inspiration, I've decided to try my best to live intensely in every way possible. Not that I've necessarily been holding back on any of my emotions or feelings, as I've actually made great strides recently in embracing these things, but I think there are times when I, like most people I know, get a little content and relaxed and take some time---days, hours, minutes, whatever---for granted.

So, here's to taking a more active role in experience-making and the continued embrace of each and every opportunity for life.