“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Albert Einstein
A few days ago, I was hurrying across the room to open the door for a workman who was coming to fix holes in our walls resulting from a plumbing emergency.
In our haste to make space for the workman, we emptied the contents of a closet (where one of the holes was) into the middle of the room that I was crossing, and as I scurried, one of those wayward closet inhabitants tripped me. I crashed onto the floor, twisting the joint of my left big toe and falling onto my right arm.
I tried icing, but I could easily ice only one body part at a time as I tried to work at my computer, and since I needed to be able to walk, the foot got preferential treatment. As a result, while the bruise on my foot looked terrible, I could put pressure on it and as long as I limped, was able to get around.
My arm was another matter. For the remainder of the day, I was wondering whether I had fractured anything. Rotating my wrist was excruciating, bending my elbow any amount was painful and even just having the arm hang down hurt like crazy. I couldn’t grasp things with my right fingers. The only non-painful position was if I supported my right hand with my left.
Why am I telling you this?
Because I’d written some time back about how I found it difficult to find gratitude for “little things” because doing so felt forced.
Well, that morning, I ate those words.
Because when I think back now of how wonderful it was to be able to open a jar of pickles by myself, or even raise a fork to my mouth, I get hit between the eyes with the concept of finding gratitude for everything.
I found gratitude for the fact that I fell on the carpeted floor and not onto one of my son’s tools (that he had left lying around — I need to talk with that boy), that I am still allowed to work remotely and can do so from the comfort of my bedroom, that we have a car with automatic transmission (no shifting!), and that we had enough bags of frozen veggies that I could easily rotate through as they thawed and keep icing.
The next morning, I experienced a tsunami of gratitude for feeling better, getting more mobility and being able to avoid a visit to urgent care. That one trip knocked some sense into me and reminded me that it is not nearly as difficult to fill my cup with joy for things I’ve been regularly taking for granted.
So, that trip I took helped me discover that I don’t need to wait for gloriously grand things to occur in order to feel gratitude. Multiple reasons for a grateful attitude are all around me, every day.
Frantic Shanti 