TODAY IS A GIFT. LOVE YOUR PRESENT
It never ceases to amuse me that we forget just what a miracle life is. Consider, if you will, that some sticky white stuff mixes in the dark with a bunch of cells called an egg, to become a human being. Not to mention, that this human being grows inside another one for nine months before popping out through an opening smaller that its head! What’s more, it is then nourished by that other person from a heretofore unopened opening in the chest for any number of months and starts to grow again. I mean if you were designing a world from scratch, is that how you’d do it? I don’t think my imagination is that – well, weird!
The fact that we have an imagination is weird. I mean, we can see, hear and touch but we can imagine seeing, hearing and touching too: the colour of your front door; your favourite song; or the soft fur of a puppy or kitten. We can even invent things in our imagination that no-one else has thought of before – wheels, the spinning jenny, airplanes, vacuum cleaners and spicolozers. (Well, I haven’t yet invented the spicolozer but I might!) We can assign names, such as love, hate and fear, to bodily sensations and then use our imaginations to increase and prolong the feelings.
When I wake up in the morning, isn’t it a complete miracle that I wake up at all? That I have eyes to open? That they provide access for my brain, inside my head, to ‘see’ the world outside of me? That I am here in this day, living a life, making choices about what to do, where to go, how to feel and to behave? Maybe not all our choices come from a completely free will, as we have to do certain things to survive, but how we face the day is our choice.
I remember reading Viktor Fankl’s account of his time as a prisoner in a concentration camp in World War II, where you’d think there would be only misery and despair. He tells a story about a man who ran into their hut to summon the other prisoners outside to witness a beautiful sunset. He said what he and the other inmates had experienced was proof that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to chose one’s own way.”
So, what can we choose today? See this day as an amazing gift, and love your present.
Come to one of my events and see what other miracles your brain and body perform!