Amazing is the new normal.
If you could see where your life is now, from when you were 5 years old, how amazed would you be? Would you consider it magical?
The lives we live today are blessed beyond understanding. We live at a time where our health is better than ever, our communications and access to information is faster than it has ever been, and where our quality of life has a greater potential than many of us would have ever thought possible.
And still people, including me, seem possessed by a quiet yet pervasive need to ‘over-produce’ their lives. An invitation to a dance is now an event in itself. A meal with family is not complete without Tweets, Instagrams, YouTube videos and Facebook sharing. A wedding turns into a production to rival a Hollywood movie of years past. In our need to over-do anything, we are losing our appreciation of everything.
When I was 5 years old, if you had shown me that I would be able to share my thoughts with people all around the world from my own home, I would have marveled at the technology and considered my life to be wonderful.
If I had known that I could access millions of songs, and hundreds of thousands of books within an instant, I would have been amazed, and desperate to enjoy that life.
Now, I find myself taking it for granted.
In a world full of wonders, we have lost our sense of the wonderful, and we allow the ever rising apex of what is possible to denigrate our appreciation of what we can do.
How can I regain my sense of wonder and appreciation for ‘the normal and the everyday’? I believe for me it starts by slowing down and focusing in the moment on what I do have, what I can do. Focusing on the service I can give today brings me into the moment and reduces my interest in the possible and onto that which is performable.
Life is miraculous, fragile, beautiful, fleeting and wonderful.
May we try to find a greater peace in the everyday, and worry less about what we see in our newsfeeds.
Life, in all of its majesty, comes down to the quality of our relationships, not the quantity of those who observe us from afar.
Today, I invite you to focus on the everyday, and find wonder.
-- Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings