How Times Of Tragedy Can Actually Teach Us The Most Valuable Lesson Of All

Sometimes we get so complacent in our lives. We take everything for granted without even realizing it because life passes us by so quickly. Before we know it high school is a distant memory, our college years went faster than we could have imagined, and real life is here to slap us in the face with bills, mortgages, careers and kids.

Between all those years, we don’t realize the relationships we let drift away and the contact we lose with people, including people who we might love; those are generally the ones who suffer the most. When you are wrapped up in your own life and becoming your own person it is easy to grow without some of the people who might mean the most to you.

It might take your significant other cheating on you in order to realize how little you were paying attention to your relationship. They might have been giving you signs that something isn’t right, but you didn’t notice. You let it slide because you were concerned about your own life. You stopped going on date nights every week because you had new plans, you stopped sending them flirty messages at work because you got wrapped up in emails. All the little things that kept your relationship alive and thriving you stopped doing. You might not have even realized how far you have drifted because you were busy growing in your own way.

But it might take heartbreak to make you realize how much you love them still. It might take that misery and pain to make you want to start over with them, to refresh your love because you aren’t ready to lose them, even if you started taking them for granted.

It might take a sick family member for you to notice how distant you are from your loved ones. They might have been calling you, but you blew them off because you were ‘busy’ or just didn’t want to talk. They might have been trying to make plans you with, but you always cancelled on them because something else sounded more appealing to you.

Then you grasp that this might be the last few years, months or days you get to spend with them. It makes you want to be around them, despite what else is going on in your life. It makes you reprioritize your life, recognizing what is actually important.

It might take a close friend failing a suicide attempt for you to open your eyes to how far you’ve let your relationship slip from them. You aren’t there for them like you promised. Life happened and you started focusing on your self and your new friends, your new coworkers and your new family. Forgetting all about them. Now they have no one to turn to. They’ve tried to reach out, but they never seemed important enough for you to miss a girl’s night out with your new friends.

It takes knowledge of that attempt for you to notice how far you’ve lost touch from everything you once promised you would never. It’s the realization you’ve become the person you said you would never be, absorbed in your own life so much you forget about the people around you.

It’s a sad, harsh reality that is life.

You maybe aren’t even genuinely happy with the way things are going, but you still wake up every morning and do it anyways. Before you realize it’s been weeks since you last talked to your parents, it’s been months since you called your brother and you can’t even remember the last time you talked to your childhood best friend. All it takes is something tragic to happen to pull you out of your monotonous life and remind you what’s important.

Call old friends, rekindle the flame with your boyfriend or girlfriend, check in on your family; don’t be so wrapped up in your own life you forget about the ones who are there by your side regardless if you realize it or not.