Take stock of how full, good and rich your life really is. For just a moment to count all the things that make your life a little easier. Consider the simple things such as:
- indoor plumbing
- hot water for your shower
- a refrigerator / kitchen/ pantry stocked with food
- grocery stores
- paved roads
- family
- friends
- heat
My in-laws are in town today for my daughter’s birthday. Before I went to work my wife and her mother had gone to get groceries at a specialty health-conscious store across town. Note that the local big box store which is designed to meet the needs of a wide mass of consumers, does not carry exactly what my wife needs. She drives, in one of our two cars, on roads that are paved, to the speciality store across town.
I sit here in a coffee store (an entire store devoted to coffee?) writing on a computer that I can carry anywhere. I have the time to do this because I am not washing a week’s worth of clothes by hand, and I’m not having to plow a field with a team of 2 horses. This amount of “free time” I have would have been unfathomable 100 years ago.
My father-in-law volunteered to watch my daughter while I work in my “office” just a few miles from the house. Thinking about things from his vantage point, how amazing is it to live so long that you get to spend time with your grandkids? As I was pulling out of the driveway on my way to write I realized that we live very long, full lives. We have so many conveniences compared to what was available in the past. These conveniences wash our dishes, dry our clothes and give us, well, more. More time, more availability, more room to give. As a whole, we are better equipped to meet the needs of others than perhaps any other time in history.
We have full, wonderful, productive lives. Today, take time to notice how good you have it.