Here is the thing about a day.
It has a million gifts for each one of us.
Start with the apparent. Our bodies are miracles. We all woke up this morning. Now THAT is a bonus on any given day. One that most of us take for granted. Me? I say “Whew. That was close…”
Yes, this morning, our hearts pumped, our lungs processed air, and our nervous systems were on full alert, zipping this way and that. And we did not have to give any one of these processes a single thought. They all went about their way…. perfectly…. without a bit of help from us.
Within each one of us is so much more than that. (As if that wasn’t enough!) Some of us are very smart, or incredibly kind. There are the funny ones, the athletic, the business-savvy, the innovators, the worker-bees, the crafty, and the giving. Every person has a pocketbook-full of talents. Gifts within ourselves… and gifts to be shared with others.
Beyond that is the world in which we live. Bazillions of gifts in every direction we look. Green grass, clean water, TVs, yarn, books, our pet goldfish Milton, delicious food, warm shelter, freedom, mayonnaise, hot showers, reading glasses, medicine, spandex …. and so very much more.
Some days, seem more fortune-filled than others. You could be sitting in your kitchen, browsing over your Aquaman-Action-Figure Collection… and the doorbell rings. It is the Man in Brown. He brings you a box. Inside, you discover a magical Onion Chopper. Low and Behold. Just days ago, you wrote about the perils of chopping an onion, and TODAY…. you get this gift. It smells curiously of Peanut M&Ms. This makes you smile.
Some days, you take a walk outside, just after a rain. Everything is beautiful… the flowers, the leaves, the rocks, and the sky. Even the mud puddles and the pesky deer fly, biting the back of your head.
Most of us live in America, where the going is good. But there are humans like us, who live in the most desperate of places. Yet many of them still see the beauty, and they still see the joy.
We can think about all the things that are going wrong in our lives. Sometimes, it seems, we even have to. But, when we use our time focusing our thoughts on “the elsewhere”… we are not fully present to life. We see what we look at. If we focus on the negative, that will be the only thing that is in our view.
At any given moment, we have a lot to appreciate, right there in front of us. We just have to see the leaf, drink the coffee, chop the onion, breathe the air.
And that is the gift of life. Of us.
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“Give freely to the world these gifts of love and compassion. Do not concern yourself with how much you receive in return, just know in your heart it will be returned.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
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“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
― Albert Einstein
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“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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