The past few days have left me thinking about impermanence. It started with my dad having a heart attack yesterday morning, but took “flight,” after finding a dead bird outside my window, and then being at a clinic with lots of elderly all week. It’s not that I’m thinking seriously about death, more just that everything is finite. Relationships eventually end, just as my living in Hawaii will eventually end. The best part about living here is that beauty doesn’t seem to be finite; it’s everywhere all the time. I can be sitting on a smelly bus with a whole bunch of homeless people passing the most beautiful white-sand beaches, or I may be walking home from class pouting about my work load and look up to see a rainbow. In that way, this place is magical. I’ve screened close to 1,000 patients for coronary artery disease in the past few years, and I would say more half of them were at risk of developing or already had heart disease. I reminded my dad that his episode is a wake up call to begin living more fully, but also to start taking better care of himself. The Buddha talks about the laws of suffering in terms of attachment. It is not the desire for life that is the problem, it is the attachment to it. And while we only have a short time on this earth, it’s important to wake up.