I think we can all agree about the wisdom and value in not taking things for granted.
My book, "In It Together", talks in part about how we can be blessed by discomfort and seeming misfortune. When the body weeps for what it has lost; the spirit can rejoice for what it has thereby found. The vice versa is also true: Just as blessings often come in disguise, prosperity can be a curse. If you want to kill a crack addict, just give him a winning lottery ticket.
My book says more than once what's worth saying again here now: All humans are on the addiction spectrum.
The more material riches and comfort you give a person, the more at risk you put that person of the many pitfalls about which my book advises. You don't need to be religious at all, let alone Christian, to appreciate Jesus's wise question: For what has a man profited, if he gains the whole world for the price of his soul? We all know what it means to be a sell out, and it's the profits themselves that are the usher of that curse.
Not taking things for granted is not as simple as it sounds. In the name of not taking something--or someone--for granted, we can make a similar mistake of which my book also discusses.
There's a difference between true loving gratitude and fearful clingy attachment. There's a difference between appreciation and addiction. There's a difference between true love versus toxic codependency. There's a difference between acting out of love without expectation versus acting out of possessiveness or out of fear of loss. Whether you want the gesture returned or simply want the beloved to stay, or otherwise to influence them for your own gain, it is still simply expectation and control. How can you truly love the sunset if you are busy greedily seeking to own the day and fearfully wishing to never see night again?
When we act from greed or fear, including but not limited to codependency, it tends to ultimately be abusive, if not to the other than to the self.
Of course, in the lingo of my book, the self of tomorrow is just another other.
But whatever other it is, be it an older version of the human in the mirror, or be it a lover through a window, ask yourself, do you seek to own it or love it? To control and possess, or to bravely appreciate without expectation? Is it from a place of true loving free-spiritedness that you give gratitude, or through the iron bars of the frightened confines of addiction and fearful possessiveness that you cry out in greedy desperation, seeking to take ownership or take control of an other and of that which is not yours to keep?
The possessive clingy hand that squeezes a butterfly thereby kills it. But, shall a butterfly land upon your unpossessive hand, you may be wise to neither take its beauty for granted nor to cave to any urge to clutch it.
Know that it will ultimately fly away, commit to accepting and allowing that, and then find yourself free to truly love it that much more now in this moment, in the infinite depth of your unique mystical present.
Fear, loss, anger, jealousy, discomfort, and pain are all unavoidable for humans. Bravery isn't the absence of fear, but the transcendence of it: To experience the feeling but be free of its would-be tyranny.
As you appreciate the butterfly, you may unavoidably feel fear that it will fly away. Will you choose then to bravely keep your hand open regardless?
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My book, "In It Together: The Beautiful Struggling Uniting Us All", is available for purchase from all major book retailers in both ebook and hardcover format.
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