We recently had Sunday lunch with dear friends. An hour after we parted, the husband was dead. They stopped to pick up some produce from a roadside stand, five minutes from their house. A large car drove full speed into our friends’ parked car at a 90% angle, instantly killing the driver and wounding his wife, the passenger.
We don’t, we can’t, prepare for life-altering tragedies like this. And if we spend our waking minutes in terror that disaster is just around the corner, we become immobilized. What can be done?
Let’s not call it gratitude, but rather mindfulness, of each minute living in a world full of unimaginable wonders that will guide us to the stunned appreciation of our shining, transient world – even when we are wrestling with our darkest demons.
There’s my husband/partner, lent to me by the universe for the past twenty years and, I’m hoping, for at least another decade. He’s 80, handsome, smart, kind and, well – declining a bit. I cherish every minute we have, even the difficult ones. We fall asleep and then, miracle of miracles, we wake up next to each other the following morning.
We all take so many things for granted as we plow through days packed with myriad obligations, some welcome and some less so. Why don’t we set aside a few minutes, say three times a day, to marvel at what we have in our finite lives? We will never be bored, only astonished, at all the events over time that conspired to put us here, now, trying to make sense of our pasts and wisely shepherd our futures.
GRATITUDE
By Sally Haver