Tag: Miracle

Miracle. All of it.

Live & Learn17 Comments

There are a finite number of times we get to do anything and after the first time it’s a count. We only get to look at the sky so many times in a life. There are a finite number of rainstorms and seasons that we’ll witness, and the number seems so big until it doesn’t. We never know when will be the last time we taste something or see someone or do anything at all. And for all the money in the world, time is not for sale no matter what the doctors say when we beg for more of it toward the end, finally seeing that we forgot to count the raindrops.

— Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within (Random House, July 9, 2024)

Notes:

a great secret to happiness

Live & Learn32 Comments

To start today on a path toward enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, consider the possibility that you don’t need to learn anything new. Instead, you may want to unlearn some false lessons that have pervaded the culture over the past few years. The first untruth is that you must know your destination; the second is that a good life is one that minimizes suffering; and the third is that you must know and live your own truth. The Dominican sages and the modern scientists together show that these are all fake news and serious impediments to a happy life.

In their place, I suggest that you start your path of life by repeating each morning these three affirmations:

  1. I do not know what this day will bring, but I will live it the best I can, with an attitude of love and generosity.
  2. I am grateful for the good I experience today, but I do not fear the bad, which is part of being alive and an opportunity for learning and growth.
  3. I do not possess the absolute truth, but today I will seek it with honesty, an open heart, and a spirit of adventure.

…You will notice that all of the modern untruths I’ve identified have one big thing in common: They say you should focus on yourself—your future, your career, your discomfort, your truth. All moral teaching aside, how boring is that? I can think of no better way to miss the awesome majesty of life than to focus egotistically on a psychodrama in which you are the star.

Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness. We could add one more affirmation to complete the list above: I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.

— Arthur C. Brooks, from “Some Dominican Wisdom We Can All Use” (The Atlantic, May 23, 2024). Adapted from the commencement speech delivered on May 19, 2024, at Providence College, a Catholic institution founded by Dominican friars.

Walking. It is so easy to forget…

Live & Learn39 Comments

And here I go, 1,292 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

There she stood on the dock, a Great Blue Heron, vigilant, stoic, absorbing a light drizzle.Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for what?

I walk.

Compared to yesterday’s magical sunrise, today, TODAY, was just painfully uninspiring —  with the bonus of rain spitting all over the camera gear. It took all of me, all that I had, to keep forward motion and not take a u-turn back to the exit.

I walk.

A supersized BK soft drink cup lay on the path, teethmarks on the recyclable straw where the pollutant ingested the soda. Trash bins everywhere around this park, yet here it is.  “I’m still willing to buy that life is beautiful if you dress it up right, that people are basically good, or that love can save you. I still want to believe.” (Jonathan Evison, Again and Again ) Continue reading “Walking. It is so easy to forget…” →

Sunday Morning

Live & Learn17 Comments

At church a baby girl was baptized. She lay quietly in the vicar’s arms, absorbed in contemplation of things around her, her eyes very wide and bright, her hands spread like stars.

— Helen Garner, One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995 (Text Publishing Company, October 12, 2021)

Post inspired by Jay, Lizzy & Ellie. Thinking of you. Photo Credit: Pexels

Miracle. All of It.

Live & Learn10 Comments

When the nurse brought her, all swaddled up, to the glass-panelled door outside the operating theatre to show her to me, tears projectiled on to the glass, signalling the single most miraculous moment of my life. If there’s a nanosecond’s worth of choice when you fall in love, there was no measure of time between seeing Oilly and feeling the most profound, life-changing love imaginable. Beyond all counting! Our longed for, miracle, baby.

— Richard E. Grant, A Pocketful of Happiness: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, August 1, 2023)

Notes:

  • Photo of Richard E. Grant & his daughter Olivia in The Sun, Feb 15, 2019
  • Book review by Amy Bloom in NY Times: Richard E. Grant Fights Grief With ‘A Pocketful of Happiness’. The Oscar-nominated actor’s new memoir is at once a Hollywood air kiss and a moving tribute to a happy marriage that ended too soon.
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”