Today's
Meditation:
Time
passes at its own speed, not at the speeds we'd like it to
travel. I can't count how many times in my life I've
looked at the date and realized that a certain amount of
time had passed-- "Oh, my God, it's already early
August!" Sometimes when I've been extremely
busy in work situations that kept me going all the time,
days and weeks have flown by with little time for appreciation
because I was constantly on the go with work, focused on
things that I normally wouldn't have focused on had I been
away from work.
Appreciation
takes work and effort. It's not something that tends
to happen normally-- we often have to be reminded of those
things for which we should have appreciation. So
trying to appreciate every moment can be a difficult task,
but not impossible. As long as we take the effort
seriously, and make the effort consistently, we can teach
ourselves to live our lives with higher levels of
appreciation.
Someone's
going to move away, and we may feel that we wish we had
appreciated more the time we had been able to spend with
them. Relatives will die, and we'll wish we had
appreciated their presence enough to spend even more time
with them. Summer will pass and we'll wish that we
had taken more time to appreciate the warm weather.
These are all regrets, a feeling that is much better to
avoid in our lives. And the only way to avoid regret
in the future is to act in authentic ways today, and to
get as much as we can out of each day, and to give as much
as we can to each day.
Each
moment is an opportunity to love, to appreciate, to give,
to take, to dream, to learn, to relax-- simply to be.
Appreciate these moments, for they are all that we have
right now, and how we feel in the future, when many of
these moments will have passed us by, depends on how we
act right now.
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