An Appreciation of You

This week we started off with gratitude for uncommon things. Then we discussed judgments and how they separate people. They’re essentially the opposite of gratitude. One makes you feel abundant and cared about and the other leads you to feel alone and insecure. Today we develop the resilient part of you that gets you through the difficult times so that you can get to better times.

If this resilience is going to be truly helpful to you in dark times then it will need to be handy, so it’s best if it’s actually an aspect of yourself. People drug themselves or anaesthetise themselves with alcohol or distract themselves with technology, but these all pale in comparison to the high one gets from believing in our actual connection to the universe. It’s a very real thing.

Let’s look at who and what you actually are. Factually, your DNA is 99.9999% the same as an ape, so how much different could you be from Albert Einstein, or Usain Bolt, or Adele, or Stephen King, or The Pope or anyone else on Earth? You can be grateful for that, and you can also feel grateful if you’re not challenged even more, because you’re also almost identical to Stephen Hawking.

No matter who you are, 99% of the mass of your body consists of just six chemical elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium make up that last 1%. In physics terms, you’re literally made out of the dust from the parts of old stars from the universe’s past. Seriously.

Get down to the quantum level and the air in your lungs and all of those elements start bleeding into the background of the world. As Jill Bolte Taylor described in her Stroke of Insight, the border between you and an external world is pretty tenuous. If we had vision that saw it, and you were standing in a river, how would the water that makes up so much of your body differ from the water in the water? And what about the atmosphere in your lungs? Is that the world or you?

To say that you’re not connected is frankly ridiculous. You can think thoughts about being separate, but you’ll still be all of those connected things thinking those ephemeral thoughts. You’re still made of the universe and you live within the universe, so any separation is an illusion created by your temporary thinking. You’ll still just dissolve back into the world when you end, like ink returning to the inkwell. What you’ll think about that will be irrelevant.

You were born of the universe and you will return to the universe. This is just a layover on your flight through eternity, so you might as well enjoy it. It’s not like you’ll be graded on your performance. Everyone gets to go home equal in the end.

You can think thoughts about how this truth also makes you like all the people you don’t like, but you have to remember that there are people that love those people. So no matter who you decide to use as an icon of your existence, they will be loved. You can’t get away from it. You belong in the most fundamental way that no one can take it away from you. You are truly a child of the universe and you truly are connected to all.

So if this is all factually true, why would you waste that existence thinking thoughts of separation and weakness when you could be grateful for those connections? You could worship yourself not as a self-centered ego, but as a genuine and critical aspect of the universe. You weren’t created by accident. The universe wanted you to be, so Be. That’s why the original Hebrew word for God kind of means Is-be. Be your Is. Stop being a definition and start just plain being.

Today’s meditation is simple: find five things to be truly grateful for about yourself. If you saved a friend, be grateful you saved that wonderful life. If you’ve had a child be grateful for the act of creation. If you helped someone in a way that matters, own that. Five compliments from you to you about you. When you’re better you could find a zillion of them. But for now five will do. Five will give you a nice launch into your weekend. Enjoy. You are loved.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.