Some rambling thoughts on this lovely Tuesday morning.

When tragedy strikes it seems that life takes a moment to breathe on its own, that is how I felt this last Sunday.

I believe that the purpose of fame, at times, is to make us all take an introspective look at OUR lives. The passing of Kobe Bryant was not more important than the passing of any of the other people aboard that helicopter, it just woke us up. Many of us sleep with the noise of a fan in our rooms and it helps us sleep, yet let some other noise hit our sleeping ears and it wakes us immediately. Kobe’s death was  that “Other” noise.

I don’t know much about Kobe Bryants’ life, and purposefully I am not going to research it. I know that he was a talented basketball player, one of the greatest ever and I saw him  play many times on television. I know that he went from high school to the NBA at age 17. I also am aware that his dad was a pro player, that Kobe wanted to play for the Los Angeles Lakers and that he got his wishes. He won championships, played with Shaq, and got beat badly in the finals one year by my Detroit Pistons. I also know that his career was not always a bed of roses.

Yes, there were downfalls, injuries, losses, arguments and a scandal. I do not know enough about the scandal other than what I have read and knowing that there is always hyperbole and conjecture, I will pass on any comment. It is what it is and nothing more or less…it is there. In all transparency, my sister was caught in a tragedy with a famous athlete and I remember the things said about her back in 1995 and the years that followed. Ugly things that I went back and read this morning, her husbands life was taken from him at age 43. So when the subject matter of scandals appear, I try to look at it from many different angles.

So that brings me to today, to this blog, to this view of life. We all travel down the path of life differently, with different challenges, different stimuli and definitely with different experiences. No two people are exactly the same, there is always something that is different, so judging a person is also done differently because of our own experiences. It would be nice NOT to judge, we all do. I choose to look for the good in someone, to take that mental picture of how I want to remember the person and when someone dies so young, that last picture seems to be frozen in our minds…and when that person has fame, it seems to be a bit more vibrant picture for some reason.

Elvis will never be older than 42 and that is how I see him, John Lennon, 40. Frozen in our mind, forever. Kobe, for me, will be 41 and a loving dad. I can see him as a young player, yet a dad at age 41 will be his lasting picture in my mind. I cannot tell you why, that is just it, so when we want to bring up the dirt from the floor we need to pause and ask “WHY?”. What good will that do to you? Will it make you feel better? Your wrongs less wrong? Will it make his surviving children feel better? Do you care? Again, I choose to remember him as a loving dad, hopping on a transport vehicle to get him, his daughter and some of her teammates to their game. No, that does not happen everyday in South Georgia, we drive, the world is different in LA. The same thing has happened in other areas, a van or car with players on the way to the game has crashed and people perished.

Life happens moment by moment all over the world. We complicate it. I was reading about the Lost City, in Columbia. Where you can sit and hear absolutely no sound from any man made invention, nothing but nature. We complicate it, we manipulate it for OUR pleasure. In reality, it is just there, if we are there, or not there, it is there. Even as I sit here in my home office, I look at it as quiet, when I listen closely I hear the hum of the cars on I-75 probably a half mile away and yet I have become so accustomed to them, I think it is quiet…it isn’t. We complicated it.

Kobe’s death is a tragedy, no more or less because of his fame and background, though his fame gives us a wake-up call to examine our life and what or who is important in it. He will always be, to me, 41 and a loving dad. Life happens, it is just there, always. It is just there, embrace it, live it, love it.