Two years ago, I wrote an ill-fated post about how happy I was with life and everything I had managed to accomplish or accumulate. Fate had other ideas and only six months later I was looking at the ruins of a life with most of those things gone away.
Yah, so I won’t be making that mistake again.
I realize now that in the end you will lose everything you have. It’s not a sad or depressing thought, life is a game with a well known ending. The only question is how you play the game along the way. That might not seem like much, but it’s really everything.
From everything that happens to you in life some good comes. In my case the good that comes from all my suffering is my appreciation for the little things in life. It’s easy not to take the big things for granted, but to be truly thankful I believe you have to appreciate how lucky you are for each and every breath you take. I’m happy to report that I am thankful in a way I never really thought I could be before.
Case in point, I used to want to volunteer because I felt some amount of guilt for all I’ve gotten in life – and yet I never found the time. Now, I volunteer out of my sheer love of helping other people. I’m not better or worse than anyone else, but in cases when I can help people I enjoy it. I’m thankful for the opportunity to help others, not for the fact that I have some things others do not.
Most of all, I am thankful for all of the amazingly unlikely events over millions of years that resulted in me being able to sit here and write this down. If you think about it, the fact that we live on lives on a small piece of rock hurling through space is really quite amazing.
I have taken around 250 breaths while writing this post. Some people don’t even get that many, so I consider myself beyond lucky. I’m just thankful.
