There’s a scene in the Frank Capra movie Lost Horizon that always shakes me, no matter how many times I watch it. It’s near the end of the film, when Hugh Conway meets the leader of Shangri-La- the High Lama. In this meeting, Conway is introduced to all the truths of the magical place. All the answers to all the many questions are finally within his grasp, and that’s when he begins to understand the design his life is supposed to follow.

A little more than a year ago, Sydney Aiello was busy sewing together the designs on what her life was going to look like. A high school cheerleader who always brought a smile with her to Monday mornings, she loved Yoga and music and fancy gowns and hanging out with her best friend in the world, Meadow Pollack.

Sydney was figuring it all out. Test scores and heartbreak…

My food ran out days ago and there’s no prospect of rescue up here at the top of the world. I try to put up my tent, but the arctic wind bludgeons and tears at the fabric. My compass is gone, my GPS is behaving strangely and the whiteout obliterates the stars. I no longer know which direction to walk in. The next time I fall, I stay there, slumped in the snow, ready to give in to sleep at last.

I drift, watching flurries of snow dart past my goggles. The snowstorm cancels out any differences in the landscape. When my eyes close it’s darker, but that’s the only difference, it seems, between being awake or asleep.

There is something tugging me. Something rough and insistent. I try to shrug it off but it gives me no rest. I open my eyes to a blur of dark movement. It…

Today we’ll go about our daily lives as if there is a tomorrow. Same as twenty three other people did. Twenty three people whose only crime was that they were living inside the age of insanity, where lives do not matter as much as rhetoric.

We like to say that tomorrow is not a guarantee, but for some, neither is today. This post is about the today they never got to have.

In Pittsburgh . . .

Irving Younger will grab an umbrella on his way out the door. He’ll leave a few minutes early so he can say how do to the regulars at his favorite coffee shop. He’ll share a funny story or two before making his way to Saturday service, where he’ll be the familiar face that greets Melvin Wax. These two early birds will boast about how they don’t feel a day over fifty, in spirit. Their…

People are inherently good.

We’re raised to believe this concept from the time we’re old enough to get bored during liturgy and choose sides on the playground. Most kids aren’t concerned with empirical validation when the freedoms they hold most dear are threatened; yanno, stuff like playtime and dessert.

Then there was me.

I questioned everything, no matter how convincing the adults were at selling the points. I wanted to believe people were generally good, but I had myriad reasons to be skeptical. Adding to my distrust of the status quo was the fact that I read, a lot. And I observed, everything.

So it was that I questioned the cross stitched tenets of a happy life, which mandated that you go to school, score a good job and get married. Societal conventions read like a manual, and I knew that spiritual complications navigated through so much more than a…