Today's Quotation:

I think these difficult times have helped me to understand
better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in
every way, and that so many things that one goes around
worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

Isak Dinesen

Today's Meditation:

I can't even begin to count the minutes and the hours that I've wasted worrying about things that just didn't matter.  I might have said something that I though offended someone, and then spent days worrying that the person was mad at me.  Then I'd see that person, and not only wasn't he or she mad at me, but they had completely forgotten what I'd said.  Or I'd be a couple of minutes late for something and I'd be afraid that I'd be "in trouble," only to arrive and find out that not only hadn't things started yet, but not everyone had shown up.  Sometimes I've even been one of the first ones there.

These worries keep us blind to the beauty that is in all of our lives all of the time.  When my mind is focused on possible problems, how in the world can I expect to see beautiful things?  With practice, I've learned to let those beautiful things take my mind away from the worry, but it's taken a lot of work to be able to reach that point.

It's kind of funny, isn't it, that we have to learn how beautiful life is.  It seems that this is something that should come naturally to us, that we should see all the time.  And I think we do when we're younger--as kids we tend to be pretty constantly awe-stricken, marveling at the great things of this great world.

But then the worries get in the way.  Then we get busy and we focus on other things--things to do, things to buy, things to see, things to accomplish.  And we lose sight of the beauty.  But it doesn't have to be so.  Sometimes I think that much of our adult life is spent trying to unlearn things we learn in adolescence.  And sometimes, our best teachers are the children, who do see the beauty and wonder of the world.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Are there any worries that are interfering with your ability
to see the beauty of the world?

2.  Is everything that you worry about worth worrying about?

3.  What kinds of lessons can we take from the children
who see life differently than we see it?

Despite all the doom and gloom that constantly assaults our senses, there is a way for us to ransom our lives and reclaim our futures:  it consists in turning away from the world to recognize what in life makes us truly happy.  For each of us, what that is will be different.  But once we obtain this inner knowledge, we will possess the ability to transform our outer world.
"You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself," the pilot and writer Beryl Markham reminds us.  We cannot let this continue to occur.

Sarah Ban Breathnach