Jenny's Journal: 3 seconds

Disclaimer: This post will be a little different than my others. If you read this only to hear about the games, we lost on Friday 3-2 and didn’t play too hot, and then we tied on Sunday 1-1 and played much better. We had good team meetings, and got a lot of stuff ironed out over the weekend, so it can only go up from here. We have two home games (finally!) next weekend at Pritchett Field, so come out and support us! If you read for other reasons, however, here it goes.

On Friday, we were tied with South Alabama 2-2 going into the very end of the game. We did a great job of coming back from being down twice in the game, and maybe that took a lot out of us emotionally, mentally, and physically. With the seconds ticking down on the clock, South Alabama got a counter attack, and scored. After picking myself up off the ground to fish the ball out of the back of the net, I looked at the clock: 3.5 seconds left. That’s it. Not too much time to do anything with at the end of a game, right? Normally, this is when I tell you exactly how the game went, what we can do better, yadda, yadda, yadda. But today is different.

Life is best measured in seconds. A good night’s sleep? 28,800 seconds. A good movie while on the couch with a loved one? 7,200. A soccer game? 5,400. Do you not believe seconds are important? Ask the swimmer who just lost a gold medal by 1/100 of one. Hell, ask our soccer team who has lost 3 games this year within the last 60 seconds. 3 different 90 minute soccer games, coming down to seconds. The difference between a record of 2-5-1 and 5-2-1 (basically).

It’s cruel, really, when you think about it, paring life down to mere seconds. You think you have so much time to do things, experience things, accomplish dreams. I’m guilty of it. But what are you doing with RIGHT NOW? Forget the past, forget the future. What about now?

Have you ever thought about that, how important every second is? I have. After the game on Sunday, I got news that a friend of mine passed away this weekend. She was hit by a drunk driver. She was 22, about 31 million seconds older than me. What if she had left in her car 3 seconds later? What if she got stuck at a red light instead of going through a green, putting her 60 seconds farther back on the road? What if she had said goodbye to one more friend before she left, taking a few precious seconds? I can play the “what if” game all day, but it’s only driving me crazy.

Here is my question to you. Are you making your seconds count? Are you achieving everything you want in life? Because any second could very well be the last second. Tell people you love them. Tell people you appreciate them, you care about them. Don’t play the “what if” game with yourself. As cliché as this sounds, live your life to the absolute fullest. Make every second count. Because we don’t get extras.