An impending new year gives rise to reflection and goal setting. What will your goals for 2014 be? It’s never to early to start thinking about self improvement!

Photographers, artists, poets: show us CONTEMPLATION.

I’d like to keep things simple.

Lately I’ve been bogged down by all the fluff – stuff that, in the long run, don’t really matter.  I’ve gotten caught up in other people’s drama, and in the end, I’ve been the one who suffered.  Not them.  Not that they even cared.  But because I cared, I was the one who lost – all because I cared for things that did not matter.  All because I forgot to keep things simple.  I care because that’s just the way I am.  I speak my mind, sometimes without thinking simply because life’s too short to speak in riddles.  Life is too short, that’s the bottom line, isn’t it?  And yet we find ourselves bogged down by the details that don’t really matter.

Three years ago, my best friend died.  A week before she passed, she called me and said things that felt out of character for her,  but I listened because she said it with utmost sincerity.  After all, she said, the doctors had already told her that if the last round of treatments for her ovarian cancer didn’t work, he’d send her off for drug trials.  She said she had two clots floating around in her veins, probably the result of her treatments and now were just waiting to get her – so she said she was running out of time.

She told me not to get fat, to eat healthy and to write that book with that feisty heroine and that brooding hero.  She told me that I had to enjoy life, love my children and cherish my husband.  She believed that life was simple.  But we only make it complicated.  She told me to love, and to keep my heart full.

This month three years ago, she died from the blood clot that she knew would get her in the end.  And yet, even she kept things simple.  No memorial meant no tears for her passing.  It meant that we’d remember her the way she always was, the way she kept things simple.  She lived, she loved, and she cherished every moment.  In the end, she lived a fuller life than most people I know who continue to live and breathe and take in all the drama – or cause them, and allow the non-essential things to bog down their lives.

So yes, for 2014, I’d like to keep things simple.  For in the end, life really is too short for all the drama.

Daily Prompt