Reflect

If you had 10 seconds to name a moment in your life when you felt fully alive at every level of your being, aware that this chance at life is an extraordinary gift, how would you answer? Would it be a life-changing experience, like a wedding or birth? A peak experience, like travel or personal feat? Or something more simple, like dinner with a friend or curling up with a book just last night? Close your eyes for 10 seconds. What’s one experience you’ve had that filled you with awareness that life is a gift?

Despite efforts to hang on to the feeling or insight we have in these poignant moments, they fade amidst the busyness, difficulty, and demands of daily life. Some days, nothing feels like a gift. This is where living gratefully can be transformative, as it’s a daily practice that continually reorients and reminds us that this chance at life is anything but ordinary. We didn’t do anything to earn it, but we’re invited to experience it fully. Does this mean that life is suddenly filled with peak and profound experiences? No. But the practice of living gratefully reminds us to stop taking any of it for granted. In fact, washing dishes, driving to work, eating breakfast — these, too, can become moments ripe with our awareness of how extraordinary it is that in the four and a half billion-year history of the earth, we were given the chance to be alive for a few years, love a few people, and even just stand under the warm sun.

This week’s practices invite you to take care of the fractured world by responding to life as an amazing, unexpected, and unearned gift.