The trick was to keep your eyes peeled. There was always work, and there was always something to fix. The trick was to look around anyway. It was much harder to do this than put it in some words. There was always the tedium of the everyday. There was always some overdue bill to pay. But we had to keep our eyes peeled for the serendipity of the little wonders around us. A tiny flower sprouting somewhere, a ladybug landing on your hand, little birds flying about in what only seems to be a game of tag. This is what we had to be on the lookout for; this was all the rest we needed. It is tempting to leave life to live on a faraway island. It is enticing to completely change who we are as if, magically, as we change, so will the affairs of the world. Many have left their old selves behind to have their new selves conjure up tedium of their own; they keep leaving themselves behind when they only had to stay.
If you stay in one place as one person long enough, you start to see the many gifts that life offers. You see, for example, a capacity in you to handle the greatest of burdens. It does not appear instantly. But you see it build over time. There was, perhaps, no solution to live but to live. Everything else changes. The tide rises, and people manage to swim. The earth breaks, and people know to jump. The gales blow, and people learn to fly. The tenacity of the human soul was something nature not only understood but rewarded. But no one does it alone. As iron clad as the human soul was, we needed the others. People continuing to live together was the only way people could live, and people continuing to live was the only constant in the world. All that is to say, as long as the planet rotates about its axis, there will be people who live, and they will live together. In that, too, there was beauty.
It was marvellous how we go about our business on this planet, hand in hand. It was glorious, the way, even little by little, things change for the better. But the trick for all of that was to keep our eyes peeled. There will always be things to fix; there was always work to do; we might as well look at the sun while we’re at it.
We might as well let it kiss us softly.