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Living in Amazement

 


We live in a world that offers so many innovations that amazing has become mundane. We get upset when our phones take a few extra seconds to download an email, but forget that it is a message sent from space! You are receiving a letter from a friend across the country and it is being sent by a satellite orbiting the earth. That’s amazing, even if it does take a few extra seconds sometimes. I still remember when a phone was something attached to a wall that you could only use to talk to someone. It was beyond our comprehension that it would be carried in a pocket and have the ability to receive messages from space and play movies and take crystal clear photos.

We (myself included) get irritated when our plane is delayed by 17 minutes, especially if we have connecting flights. We have the ability to travel across the country, New York to LA, in less than six hours, and get bent out of shape because of a few minutes. In the 1800s, it would take six months to go from the Missouri River to the Willamette Valley along the Oregon trail (only about two-thirds the NY to LA distance). That is if you survived! Even if you made it, most of your family probably didn’t, having been killed by angry Indians, wild animals, starvation or disease along the way. And these weren’t “nice” diseases that killed people peacefully in their sleep, it was stuff like cholera and dysentery, diseases that made you wish you were being scalped by an irate Indian (you can read about what those infections were like in your spare time on your phone/space messaging machine).

Have you ever been on a transcontinental flight on which someone died of starvation or explosive diarrhea? I know the food is subpar and the peanut packets are hard to open, but remember you are flying through the air like a missile while watching a movie on your space messaging machine, that’s amazing! I’m sorry you are 17 minutes late after flying 3000 miles through the air like a superhero bird, get over it.

Just last week, I dropped my car off at the dealership to explore a “rattle” sound it was making. Turns it out, it was the latches on my removable hard top, first world problems for sure. Could you imagine having that conversation with your local covered wagon dealer 150 years ago? “Um, there seems to be some kind of vibration or rattle noise going on, can you guys look into it and see what might be causing it?” Everything! Literally every part of that wagon would rattle and creak … every day for six months! And you would have been okay with that because it would have drowned out the noise of people slowly dying in the back seat.

This car has cameras, satellite radio, heated and cooled seats, a touchscreen with a live-time map that continually updates my location in reference to my destination by communicating with, you guessed it, space. And they fixed the rattle. That’s amazing!

Here is the real irony, people go to their local greasy spoon diner and call their burger amazing and yet sit there and complain about every other aspect of their life. The burger is a part of a dead cow with some wilted lettuce; it might be tasty, but it is not amazing. Being able to have an entire library at your fingertips without leaving your couch, that’s amazing. Having access to medical care that can replace your heart and keep you alive after your original one stopped beating, that’s amazing. Being able to see your friends and family who live thousands of miles away and have a real-time “face to face” conversation with them over a screen while still social distancing, that’s amazing.

Don’t get amazing confused. Yes, you have challenges and difficulties in your life. Yes, you face hardships. Yes, you have setbacks. But do not let any of those things allow the amazing to become mundane. Your life is amazing, you just need to pause and reflect on it sometimes. 

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