This week has been crazy. Well actually, the last month has been an absolute Carmen Miranda-style cap to a long painful economic mess…not just in our country but globally. This week the stock markets around the world have swung like a crack monkey. Fortunes are lost and gained in seconds. Mostly lost. Keeping up with the Joneses has flown right out the window as an aspiration because who the heck even knows where the Joneses live anymore! It is impossible to tell “who’s on first”…who’s calling the shots. Probably no one.
In the midst of what seems like an economic, and thus perceived societal, free fall, I read an op-ed this week about gratefulness and finding it in the small pleasures rather than in the large pursuits. The article interviewed ordinary folks – probably meaning someone who had enough to buy a scone but not enough to buy a bakery – about what they were enjoying right now. Kind of a loaded question with a very real possibility of losing one’s head.
The reported responses were interesting and at some level heartening. People talked about very simple, basic things…like a really great cup of coffee. A walk through a flower garden. The smell of rain. Wait…that’s part of my list. But their responses were not all that different. They were about what they had been blessed with, what they currently were enjoying. Not what they were pursuing. Not the big stuff.
King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes of the meaninglessness of so many things that we hold to be important enough for our time and energy. When we as individuals and collectively as society, pursue hard after things that are as “dust in the wind” and forget to “enjoy all our years”, the resulting maelstrom engulfs everything including our financial markets. It becomes a dervish that can neither be controlled nor enjoyed, that threatens whatever has been built on the sand foundation. Hopefully we have a rock foundation somewhere to which we can return.
I do. It is made up of a flower garden, time for friends and family, being able to use my ears for someone else’s words and heart, and so many other small blessings that are larger than life when I let them fill my heart and soul.
When I reclaim my soul and my life and return them to my Father. From whence they came in the first place. I AM worth more than two sparrows.
So are you.
Just Sayin' 