MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY is the column from Esperance Express senior journalist Lauren Vardy. A redhead in body and spirit, Lauren has a curious passion for cats, tea and long walks on the beach.
Proud to be infected with the travel bug and overwhelming wanderlust, an ideal year for her would be to travel from place to place and become immersed in each culture.
Through her column, Lauren muses on the things everybody thinks but often keeps to themselves.
MOMENTS like these can be likened to walking up a flight of stairs with a distracted mind and misjudging the final step.
You expected there to be one more stair than there was, and so you find yourself off balance for a moment, before your mind shifts back to the present time and how the world really is.
Deep down, we all know that life is short and that death will happen to all of us eventually.
Yet we are infinitely surprised when it happens to someone we know.
Tragic circumstances took away a two-year-old's life in recent weeks - my sister's goddaughter. Packed in a room with 300 others to bid her goodbye, the message most took with them was of mixed feelings - what do you take from the untimely death of one so young who had no chance to live?
It is typically at a person's funeral when eulogies tell stories of good character and a selfless nature.
The only problem, as we are all too horribly aware, is that the person isn't there to hear it.
By the same token, it's a curious oddity that the same applies when people retire or move on to another place. Why is it that we often hold up what we think about a person's accomplishments until they are leaving?
We should start eulogising those who mean the most to us before they leave us.
I for one never want to hear myself saying of my team, "I wish I had told them how great they were."
I want them to know how much they matter to me now.
Celebrate the people around you. It's the right thing for you to do as a colleague, as a friend and a parent. Tell the man who worked that little bit extra on your car this week what a great job he's doing. He needs the encouragement. Thank the people who hold doors open for you, who volunteer their time at your event.
Today we live in a largely quantitative, speedy-service society. How much money do you have? How much time do you have?
We need a lot of the former but suffer from the lack of the latter. This spills over into our interactions with others - think about it. We're working crazy hours at jobs to pay the bills, leaving no time for ourselves, let alone others.
But when you get that call that makes your world stop, all of a sudden we find the time to say, "Man, they were such a GREAT person."
Had we shared that sentiment while they were still here, it could have been a game-changer. Maybe they would have felt capable of achieving a goal, or wouldn't have felt like a failure.
We don't know the depth of pain, frustration and self-doubt many of us are feeling day in and day out - but that tiny bit of acknowledgement and positive reinforcement could mean the world to someone.
Life is short. Embrace it. Tell people close by that you love them.
Don't wait until it's too late. Start now - when the words have most impact.
