I woke up feeling blessed this morning. I looked over at my seven year old who still creeps into bed with me and I watched her sleep for some time. I felt overwhelmingly lucky to be her mom and happy that she still craved the physical closeness with me that often fades away as we get older. Someday, she won’t want to come lay next to me. Someday, I won’t have the pleasure of watching her sleep peacefully, especially when the day comes that she moves away to school or gets her own place. The joy in life is found in death. When I can remember that this lifetime is limited and these experiences finite, I seem to be able to enjoy them so much more. I seem to be able to hold onto the moment I’m in just a bit tighter, just long enough to engrave it into my heart forever.
As I laid there, I thought about how many times I complained about this very thing with my fiancé who often states, “She needs to stay in her own bed because I can’t sleep well when she comes in here. I end up crowded in the corner of the bed unable to move.” Some mornings when I wake up stiff, I proclaim the same. Yet, I wouldn’t have it any other way in all honesty. The days of her childhood are numbered. In just a few more years she’ll be moving into that awkward pre-teen phase of life and her need for independence will begin to outweigh her need for me. I hope it does at some point, otherwise I didn’t do my job well enough to prepare her to fly out of the nest, yet I know my heart will long for these moments again when that happens. By loving these moments now, I store them in the treasury of my heart so I can someday pull them out and relive them just one more time.
Gratitude is the key to life. When we can train ourselves to be grateful for everything that comes our way, we can extract the nectar out of life rather than choke on its bitterness. I know, sometimes it’s hard and it feels really challenging to set the wheel in motion. I’ve had to be more intentional with my gratitude practice these days by forcing myself to write a list or even read the lists that I’ve written previously. When we feel off, it’s hard to turn the goodness on. It’s as though there is some imaginary wall that attempts to block us from it. The key is to notice the wall and start to climb over it one good thought at a time. We are the artist, the co-creator of our lives, and we get to choose some things. We get to decorate the attic of our being with the thoughts that we choose. I can look at what life has given me and spoil it with cluttered thoughts about how I wish it were something else or I can look at the same life and see the phenomenal uniqueness and beauty in the gifts that were explicitly chosen by the universe for me.
If I think about life from a higher perspective and I attempt to put myself in God’s shoes… big shoes that I could never fill, I see the importance of gratitude. Having an ungrateful spirit makes you a spoiled brat in the eyes of the Universe that provides everything. It’s like being a parent who attempts to give gifts that their children will enjoy and provide a nice life for them only to be met with a pompous, bratty child who says, “Ugh! I didn’t want that one… I wanted this one!” or “It’s not good enough… I want more!” As a parent, I know there is nothing that irks me more than when my child is ungrateful for the dinner I’ve cooked or when I’ve just bought her something and she asks for something else. Quite frankly, it pisses me off because it makes me feel like I spoiled her and have failed to teach her the value and beauty of the life and the things that she has been blessed with. I imagine that God feels the same.
We’ve all been guilty of treating life with disrespect. Instead of placing life on the pedestal and honoring it, we’ve complained, stomped our feet, and desecrated it by mistreating ourselves and others. This is what it means to sin… when you fail to honor life with the reverence it deserves, you miss the point. The point is this life was always meant to be appreciated as a gift and you are failing to do so. We’ve all failed to appreciate the blessing it is to have our own unique experiences, regardless of what those experiences look like or feel like in the moment… the blessing lies not in how it makes us feel, but that we have sense enough to experience. The very senses we have are gifts from the universe. You do nothing to deserve them and yet, they are there allowing you the gift of experiencing the world outside of yourself. There is so much we take for granted and still we are simply blessed to have any experience of life.
As I sit here writing, with the rain falling outside, I am overwhelmed with the beautiful design of this place. Each rain drop another ounce of love falling from beyond to sustain the life below. I’m in awe of the sparkling lights on my tree and the energy that runs through the wires to make them all glow. I am struck with the idea that the energy that runs within our being wants to make us glow too, but we often block the light with destructive, self-defeating thoughts. How blessed we are! When I am in moments like this, I long to stay, though I know this too shall pass. The noise of the day will set in and I’ll be swept back into the world of Maya (illusion) where something will inevitably be judged as having “gone wrong” and I will unconsciously move to complain, huff and puff about it… failing to remember what has always been true. In that moment, I’ll think back to this feeling and pray that I can come back… back to the Kingdom of Heaven where the miracles and majesty of this world are all I see and the illusion will fade back into distant memory.