Spirit Matters: Simply grateful to be alive

What is your favorite thing about being alive?

What do you enjoy most and look forward to when you awake in the morning?

I realize these can be loaded questions.

You might ask who has time to think about this, when there is work to do … bills to pay … kids to raise and drive back and forth to school and other activities … and all manner of unexpected stressors that make up life?

When we are in our own seasons of turmoil, it can be nearly impossible to think about what we like about life. My own dark seasons of depression and anxiety have underscored this for me.

But, having emerged from these dark periods in my life, I am much more aware of how fleeting time can be, and I notice more of the simple things that make life as a human meaningful. I know I am not the only one who feels they have lost years, and sometimes decades, of their lives to illness, misfortune or some other grievance they just couldn’t get over.

Maybe one of the gifts of enduring and wrestling with hardships is you do eventually get to a point where you don’t want to waste another minute, and you want to suck in all the beauty this life has to offer while you can.

These days, it doesn’t take much to excite me.

Whereas when I was younger, I might have needed a trip to the amusement park to stir things up, now all I need to do is admire the vitality all around me, and be grateful that I, too, am a part of this great big web of inter-being.

I feel that vitality in the awareness of my breath filling my body.

I feel that vitality in the squirrels and birds jostling for front and center at the birdfeeder.

I feel that vitality in the wide array of colorful flowers in full bloom.

I feel that vitality in the neighbor walking down the street.

I feel that vitality in the laughter that comes out of my being when watching old sitcoms, the stars whom are now long gone, but shared their gifts in such a way that their spirits will reverberate for generations to come.

I know.

We don’t live in a Utopia.

Life isn’t perfect, and no matter how much we recognize those aspects of life that light our fire, there will always be some kind of challenge to deal with.

Even on rainy or dark days, though, all that vitality is still there, just maybe hidden from our awareness.

I feel that vitality after I’ve had to let go of dreams I’ve had since childhood, which I tried and failed. I feel gratitude to have had the dream in the first place, and to have had the means by which to give it a go. I feel gratitude for the people I met during that time and how, though the time was brief, something I did might have influenced those people in a positive way.

I feel that vitality in the tears of grief that fall from my eyes, knowing those tears were born out of the complicated wrestling with life and love, from which they emerged.

I feel that vitality in dealing with challenging people; maybe one of these times I will finally realize they are less something to react to and more an opportunity from which I might grow.

When we quiet ourselves, and look around at our lives, we begin to notice that everything in our lives – everything – is a portal to soulful appreciation for the limited time we have on Earth.

I could live another three or four decades, but knowing how fast time goes, even 40 years doesn’t seem like enough to experience all the wonder and magic life has to offer.

So, I don’t think about the forty years, and whether or not I will live that long.

I think about today, this moment, and the many gifts it has to offer.

I look around at my life, and I am grateful for all of it.

Simply speaking, I am grateful to be alive.

SPIRIT MATTERS is a weekly column by Jerrilyn Zavada Novak that examines experiences common to the human spirit. Contact her at jzblue33@yahoo.com.