If you are Irish (I'm one quarter), you know.  This year marks one hundred years since that Easter Day on which the Irish people took up arms against their British overlords to assert their independence.  It is a sacrosanct day in Ireland, and a revered moment in the lives of many Irish in other parts of the world.  In recognition of this centennial year, many books have appeared about the particulars of the revolt.
     One of these books, which I came across recently, has to do with the legendary Irish warrior Cuchulainn.  In a pensive moment, Cuchulainn is said to have remarked, "I care not though I were to live but one day and one night if only my fame and deeds live after me."  Do not all of us, to an extent, identify?  Cuchulainn wished for the Irish people to remember his deeds, to always find inspiration and glory in what he had done.
     Cuchulainn's sentiments find parallel in Gabriel Conroy's poem, "The Dead."  As he writes, "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."  Catholic to the core, these Irish revolutionaries wedded their challenge of British rule to the wonder of the life to come, fusing present ardor with certitude of coming celestial bliss.
     To a point, shouldn't we all?  Perhaps we do not want to be revolutionaries, and perhaps we do not want to be famous.  Yet we can certainly agree that if this life is lived in the compass of another, we do well to live it with vim and zest.  Just as we only live once, so do we only enter eternity once, and for all time.
     Every day, everything, absolutely everything we do, matters, not once, but twice:  eternity is that big.
     Long live present--and future--revolution.  In particular, the revolution that overturns everything we ever thought we knew.