| Seek and ye shall find the beauty,
happiness in your life From the Editor | by Tim Miejan I must admit that, after a long, hard day full of challenges and missed opportunities and headaches and, well, you get the picture, I have said to myself, and to others, "When I am done with this lifetime, I am going to rest." The rest I have in mind, somewhere in the background of this current reality, usually involves not having much responsibility for a long period of time. Perhaps it would be like coming back as an oak tree that is planted in some wealthy neighborhood and is watered and pruned and cared for and ends up living 200 or 1,000 years. It's a lifetime of living, breathing and soaking up the sun day after day for a very long time. So after a long, hard day, about the time when Joe Sixpack down the street would be finishing his fourth brew and opening another, I'm pondering the difficulty of it all and how great it would be to get some rest. [I guess that's what separates me from my neighbors, huh?] It's not that I don't find joy and happiness in the life that I lead. It's that, overall, it just seems like a very trying experience, this life here on Earth. Sometimes it's hard to get up out of bed to do it all over again. I think all of us have felt that, at some point or another. Haven't we? Isn't it hard trying to get everything done? Like having to get to the post office to mail that bill I forgot to send, but I'm out of stamps and I don't have cash and there's a line in front of the counter that's as long as a holiday shopping rush. Or like getting a call during a hectic morning at work from my son who left his backpack at home and he needs it desperately and will I you drive it over to the school NOW? And then arriving at the school, unable to find a parking space, and having to walk through a herd of small people who suddenly stream out of every doorway in the building. I guess the challenge in those circumstances is to see the bigger picture and appreciate the vastness of it all. Or the beauty of it all. Or the miracle of it all. When I stop to think about life in this moment, it is all rather mind-blowing. That my heart continues to pump blood and my lungs continue to provide fresh oxygen and my feet are able to support my body and, in the midst of all of that, I have the faculty to ponder how all of that is even possible. And then when you factor in the living, breathing capacity of everyone alive at this moment on Earth, and you begin to realize how interconnected all of our lives are with each other, in this moment, and throw in all the other species and their interconnectivity...I mean...it's no wonder it is 1 in the morning as I write this. I was awakened out of sleep to sit down and string together these words you are reading now...and I am absolutely amazed that this whole experience we call life even exists. And then, if you're really open-minded, consider life that undoubtedly exists on multiple planes of existence different than our own, in a galaxy far, far away, but with the technological superiority to exist right here, right now, just by making it so. Now, if you remove all of the apparent chaos and random acts of violence that our local news teams are so hell-bent to deliver us nightly at 5, 6 and 10, and then weed out the bigger news reports that scrawl across the bottom of the 24-hour-a-day news channels with big, upper-case letters that read: BREAKING NEWS, reserved for desperate people with hostages who take refuge in child-care centers and even more desperate reporters in news choppers competing with police choppers for airspace, aren't we left with a zillion miracles that are still happening in each and every moment -- right here and now? And I ask you, haven't our news-gathering organizations missed the real scoop? Isn't the real news the fact that we are all still alive on this spinning, blue planet -- and that we're breathing as one in a highly sophisticated dance of aliveness? It's common knowledge that good news doesn't sell newspapers. Give 'em banner headlines and a new war to worry about, and papers'll be flying out of here before the ink dries. What people want to read is bad news. They want the dirty laundry. What they really want is to focus on somebody else's troubles so they don't have to look at their own. Because if they are left staring at their own face in the mirror, they might just take their own hostages. Is our existence really that pathetic, that we thrive on each other's misgivings to the point that it's the fuel that gets us through the day? We watch it before our morning commute and listen to it while we drive. We talk about it at work and talk about some more during lunch. We catch the rush-hour speculation on the way home and laugh about it while having a few brews on the back patio. It's no wonder that we're so utterly exhausted by the time our eyes close at night. And the next day, the cycle repeats itself, ad nauseum. Where's the beauty in life? The happiness? The miracle? It's not in the flickering blue haze of the television that reflects off my nearsighted eyes, as I lie overwhelmed on the living room couch. And it's not on the radio. And it's not found in any of the other distraction upon which we've all become so dependent. The beauty, happiness, miracle, lies in small fingers of the newborn child who just arrived home down the street. It's in the weakened voice of your aging mother, whom you rarely talk to anymore. It's in the pained expression on your teenager's face when you don't have time to spend with him. And it's in the sleepy eyes that greet you each and every morning in the bathroom, as you wake from sleep and are given one more glorious opportunity to see everything around you more clearly, with more awareness, than you did the last time you looked out through the windows of your soul. I'm not nearly as tired as I thought I was. Tim Miejan is editor of The EDGE. Contact him at (651) 578-8969 or e-mail editor@edgenews.com Copyright © 2003 Tim Miejan |
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