...and smell the roses

Having just this morning finished reading Stephen King's Under the Dome, I am reminded once again how much I have to be grateful for, and how rarely I truly am. To live a life that affords me the leisure hours to enjoy more than 1,000 pages of fiction, in a country and a world that allows King and armies of other artists to engage in creative activities that have nothing to do with providing food, shelter or clothing, but which bring endless enjoyment to so many? I mean, how lucky are we, and how lucky am I? Very, very, very...and never sufficiently appreciative.

Reading King's book I am reminded of how much we have, and how much can go wrong in life. Sure, it's science fiction, but he draws from many plausible aspects of reality. Like, how would our lives be if we really had a truly self-serving despotic government, insufficient air or water or food for survival, insufficient energy to run our businesses or cook our food or warm our homes, non-existent police protection, or worse - law enforcement bent not on protecting freedom and rights, but on subverting these. I and we are fortunate to live a modern and actually quite challenge-free existence, compared to what King depicts, but also compared to the reality that too much of humanity still faces on a daily basis. So...

So, how does life bless me? Let me count the ways:

1. I am alive as a human being. In a universe that is endless in every measure, I have the good fortune of being composed of just the right elements in just the right configuration under just the right environmental circumstance to be a human being. I am allowed to be self-aware, to be able to seek and understand the deeper meanings of my life, of God and the infinite, of history, of science and all the material and energy and non-material aspects of existence, and to manipulate much of this to my own end. All of humanity that has ever existed or will ever exist comprises less than a single grain of sand in the endless ocean of the cosmos, and yet I get to be part of this human experience, if only for a nanosecond in the infinite life of the universe. How cool is that? How much greater a blessing could one ask for?
2. I have a family and friends who love me, despite my myriad flaws and weaknesses and frailties and shortcomings; who recognize and respect me for who I am, forgive my transgressions, share my hopes and dreams, bolster me when I’m down and humble me when I’m a bit too up, and who allow me the to play the same role in their lives.
3. I have material wealth and comfort and freedom beyond the imaginings of even royalty less than a millennium past, have never suffered a single moment of true hunger or thirst, nor felt the relentless and inescapable exposure to the many ravages that nature can bring against us puny mortals.
4. I have my health, which now includes my sobriety. And as the old Yiddish Bubbes would say, “When you have your health, you have everything.”

Certainly, I have much more than these few things of which to be grateful, but I think these will suffice for now. I think it is entirely possible that one could obsess over enumerating all of the many things for which we could or should be grateful, to the point that we run out of time to actually enjoy the experience of being grateful. I should know, as I’ve done only the tiniest bit of the former and virtually none of the latter…

So, as I proceed through this day, and hopefully every day that follows, I am going to try and recognize and be thankful for the blessing of being an imperfect human – part of an imperfect species among a universe of imperfect species, part of an imperfect family among a planet of imperfect families, living in an imperfect state in an imperfect country on an imperfect planet floating through an imperfect solar system in a universe comprised entirely of imperfect solar systems and planets and species and countries and states and families and individuals. And all of these are part of an incredibly perfect universe. I will be grateful, because I’m pretty damn sure that, at the end of the day, life just doesn’t get any better than this!

Carpe diem!