grocery store parking lot thoughts

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I let the man in a flatbed truck, wearing thick glasses and smoking a cigarette, continue pulling out in front of me in the grocery store parking lot.  When he noticed me, I waved him through. He waved back with genuine politeness.

You don’t get much of that kind of politeness these days.

He had just exited the liquor store with his booze.  He was probably on his way home after a long day of work on the farm and this was his afternoon reward to himself. He was going to go home, pour a drink, and sit on the porch with his pack of cigarettes as both the sun and temperature went down.  He wasn’t thinking about life. He wasn’t thinking about death. He just was.  He was a guy driving to the store and back, cigarette in mouth, not caring about contracting cancer from smoking, not caring about causing a fender bender in the grocery store parking lot, not caring about eating too much or not enough. He was just being who he was.

Which lead me to thinking about death and fear.

Why are we afraid of death?

Is it fear of leaving loved ones behind? Is it fear of a long battle with some awful disease and going into debt because of it, if you even survive? Is it fear of the unknown? We make choices out of fear. Sometimes they are the right choices, other times they are the wrong ones.

This guy didn’t care about those things.  He was just doing what he was doing. 

Of course I could be wrong about him and he’s rapidly firing thoughts at the same pace that I do, but for a brief moment, he was a part of what made me decide that I just don’t need to care so much all the time.  Things will happen when they happen, whether I accelerate that process or not is of no matter.  I don’t restrict myself of things that I enjoy that are bad for me because I want to be healthy, I do it out of fear, and I loathe restrictions.  When I was a child, I created this barrier of anxiety to help me feel secure, to feel like I had boundaries where there were none, to harness a vivid imagination and keep it from letting the vampires, ghouls, zombies, ghosts, my mother, and Santa Claus from killing me. I still carry this barrier with me today. I had forgotten why it was there or how it came to be until yesterday.

Until some guy, smoking a cigarette, driving a blue flatbed truck after leaving the liquor store, pulled out in front of me in the grocery store parking lot.