I Am Living a Charmed Life, and I Suspect You Are, Too

Looking through some old photographs a few minutes ago I realized (not for the first time) that I am living a charmed life. I like the expression, because charms are little things that sparkle and little things that sparkle are the things charmed lives are made of (figuratively speaking.)

Despite this analogy, I'm not a jewelry affionado. I am just big into gratitude and all of its benefits in terms of persepective and contentment. I truly believe we are all surrounded by beauty and love - beauty and love are everywhere like hidden Mickeys at Disneyland, only more commonplace and even less conspicuous.

I don't always feel this way, of course. Day-to-day life is, in many ways, a struggle. I see very little beauty in bills, laundry, or traffic, for example. In this life we experience the bitter and the sweet, but we get to choose which one draws our focus. Do we complain (because there is much to complain about), or do we appreciate?

Some corresponding thoughts from greater thinkers than me:

That which we feel as beauty we shall one day know as truth. -- Schiller (I think he's onto something here...he and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"...)

And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed round our incompleteness - round our restlessness, his rest. -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My Least Favorite Holiday

I'm bummed out. It's the 9th anniversary of 9-11 and I've just finished watching a documentary about that day. While it played on TV, I tried to keep busy making a grocery list and wiping down counters, but I was near tears, depressed.

Man's inhumanity to man. Pointless death and destruction.

I think they are calling 9-11 'Patriot Day,' which seems artificial to me. Other than the heroes of Flight 93 and the NYFD, I don't think of 9-11 as Patriot Day.

For the second year in a row, they are calling it a 'day of service.' I don't like that either. 9-11 didn't really have anything to do with service.

What happened on 9-11 is this: thousands of Americans went to work at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and they were murdered there, working at their desks. They went to work and they never came home again.

Other Americans got on airplanes that day and died. Many of them were traveling on business, too.

So I think of 9-11 as a working day. We honor the people who died that day not by taking the day off but by working. We just keep going about our business -- like me, making a grocery list and wiping down counters.

Meanwhile, we reflect on the innocense of the world before 9-11 and we pray that some day we can return to that peace.

And we honor the firefighters who ran up the stairs to save lives while terrified people were running down. And the passengers who 'more than self their country loved' and brought down the plane in Pennsylvania, saving countless other innocent lives.

We don't celebrate much of anything on 9-11, but we do reflect and honor and work and pray.