The Simple Thing You Must Do Regularly in 2024 to Give Your Life Meaning
In this 21st century, we are too easily distracted from what really matters
Dear Reader,
How often do you get caught up in life’s distractions? Are you like me, easily overwhelmed and feeling like a hamster in a cage wheel?
Here I am, wanting to apologize for the lapse since my last post. (But who am I apologizing to — is it really me?)
Writing gives me as chance to sort out things — quiet time. The time to really sort out things when I need it. As you can see from previous posts, I took some time out only when I had time to write, and when it mattered most and only because of external things in life outside my immediate realm that seem quite shocking, with ripple effects upon lives everywhere.
The fact that it’s been so long between posts means that I’ve either repressed my need to real quiet time or I’ve just been “too busy” — or maybe both.
It’s been too easy to make excuses not to set aside “me” time. Throughout our formative years, we really haven’t been socialized or educated to think about our own personal growth needs.
How much time has passed since you really had a chance for some quiet time, to sit and reflect on life itself? Your life?
I sit here now on a Sunday morning basking in the warmth of the early morning sun rising in my dining room, a room that faces east, a room with three light-yellow walls and a back wall behind me as orange-yellow as the sunlight that fills the room every day.
Realizing that all too often I have not tended to my deepest personal emotional needs.
Because, you know … Life must go on.
How often have you done this? Awakened too often in the mornings to take care of whatever has been pressing for your attention, distracting you from your basic appreciation for being alive?
How long has it been since you’ve basked in gratitude for the simple miracle of being alive, and the enormity of the world we exist in? A moment which is solely yours?
Too often external factors like these easily dissuade us from focusing within:
Over a 100 million people in the U.S., various news outlets report, including the Weather Channel, were under deep freeze advisories or warnings — from the disrupted Arctic polar vortex that resulted in -70 degree windchill in Montana. States throughout the West and Midwest, even as far south as Texas, were pummeled with snow and ice. Fifty states experienced snow during this period — even flurries in the Florida panhandle!
And yet, just this past August, 93 million Americans were baking under excessive heat. The July 4 holiday had a heat wave not seen on Earth for at least 125,000 years.
Life can seem so unusually precarious under these great changes from Mother Nature.
Are you acutely aware of such changes that are affecting our lives so profoundly?
Do you wonder, care about about their effects as deeply as I do?
Alas, there is only so much we can do.
But, I have decided that now, I must take time to fully immerse myself in a moment of gratitude. Right now, as the ever-present luminescence and beauty of the sunlight streams through my window — the sun, the source from which all life on our planet depends.
Because soon, this warm orb of light and love will move on, beyond my window.
At this moment, I am taking the time to be bathed by this warmth, the warmth of an eternal energy that existed long before me and will exist long after I am gone.
I am connecting with the 12 indestructible subatomic particles of which everything this universe is comprised, an indestructible energy that can only be love — energy that ebbs and flows, like the water of the oceans from which all life on the planet have emerged.
Love and joy are at the deepest essence of our existence, a universal god-force that emanates with us and through us, forever and ever.
We crave love from birth and all throughout our lives, just as our collective ancestors and all warm-blooded animals. We give love in order to receive love.
It is a Sunday morning, after all, and we it’s time to take time to remember our creation and the creation of the universe, embracing how we are all interconnected — deeply into the past, the present, the future and all around the world.
Here in the 21st century, we as the apex species on the planet, now know everything is indeed deeply inter-connected — not only around the world, but has for millions of years of years into from our past and into the future.
Religions of the world have been telling us this for centuries, and science has now been proving it.
We have been of the animal kingdom. We have existed only by instinct, but moreover, we have evolved over millions of years, learning to love, to live and to die. We have strived to survive, for millions of years, adapting to our changing environment.
Now is time to learn to begin reveling in the miracle of life, if you have not … for who know what the future in these politically charged days and surprises that Mother Nature will bring.
Time to envelop oneself in gratitude, for the simple joy of just existing…
… and of being eternally thankful.
Wouldn’t that be a great way to start the new year?
Let’s see how gratitude helps us “weather” 2024.
