We’ve all done it.

We awake from a fitful sleep. We’re out of sorts. We’re a bit crabby over this little thing or that. We struggle through our morning. Get ready for work. We arrive at our place of employment still a bit under the emotional weather.

We start working at our job. Then a jolt of reality strikes you right in the gut, as it happened to me this afternoon. A colleague asked me, “Did you hear the news?” I responded, “About what, or whom?”

Then it came. A young service technician at the Amarillo auto dealership where I work was on his lunch break. He had been riding his motorcycle en route back to work — or so I understand. He was hit by a motorist, apparently very hard.

This young man died today. He was 18 years of age. Eighteen.

I was shaken in a way I wouldn’t have expected.

I didn’t know the young man all that well. We spoke often as our paths crossed at work. He once had intended to enlist in the Marine Corps. In fact, my very first conversation was an ice-breaker as I introduced myself to him. He told me of his plans to become a Marine.

This young man was quite fit. He told me when we met he enjoyed “working out and being a bad ass.” I chuckled and told the young man, “Let me give you just this bit of advice: Lose the ‘bad ass’ attitude. The Marines have a way of dealing with that and you won’t like the way they disabuse you of that notion.”

We both laughed and went about the rest of our work that day.

His sudden death today served to remind me — it should remind everyone — about how precious life is and how quickly it can be snatched away.

My young colleague had his whole life ahead of him — or so he thought when he fired up his motorcycle today.

Tonight the young’s man life on Earth has ended.

And that niggling stuff that had me so out of sorts this morning? It doesn’t mean a damn thing.