STILL A PERFECT DAY

Last night, after another of my vertigo-like episodes had me recliner-bound
and dodging nausea all day, it was a great relief going to bed and getting fully horizontal.

IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons
http://www.scientificanimations.com/wiki-images/

Compared with most days this one hadn’t been fun. And yet, when I began my nightly prayer—typically one of mostly gratitude—instead of that misery blunting my thanks, I found it only sharpened its clarity.

As my tally of the day’s blessings unfurled, I realized it included just about every one I’d listed the night before when I was feeling fine. And when I got to part where I acknowledge my relatively good health, instead of that item migrating over to the unspoken list of negatives, there it was, still right there on the plus side.

  I appreciate...the smallest, most essential wonders:
  each precious heartbeat, every precious breath. 

Maybe it’s a product of one’s aging, but don’t we find ourselves doing this more and more? Being grateful, even for some unpleasant things, that they weren’t worse? For the reminder that one cannot take all the good stuff for granted?

IMAGE: www.thetabernaclechoir.org

After all, I’d still gotten up and gone to bed a free man, living in peace, and owning a few modest talents and ways of sharing them. What more does a person need to be happy and fulfilled?

With this new awareness of adversity’s inability to taint such blessings, I appreciate as never before not just those the big, broad wonders of life, but its smallest, most essential ones: each precious heartbeat, every precious breath.  

Thank you, Great Spirit, despite—or maybe I should say because of—the occasional pain, for another precious day of living, breathing, sensing, feeling….and, above all, of loving.