A friend of mine wrote this guest article about being grateful by looking at the amazing complexity of everyday things. I thought it was cool, what do you think?
The world is a beautiful place. Even in the midst of a troubling experience, the world remains a beautiful place. We are alive. The simplest things in our every day life are, upon careful contemplation and appreciation, supremely beautiful.
Staplers. Something that sits on many of our desks and performs a basic function, something that we all might take for granted, but think about what it took to get it onto our desk, and how lucky we are to have something like it. In the late 1800s as business was relying more and more on paper records, George W. McGill invented an automated paper fastener machine that today we call a stapler. Over many revisions and improvements by some of the smartest designers in the world we eventually crafted wonderful staplers from the iconic Swingline to room filling automated and computerized staplers. These are crafted in factories all over the world by people who are feeding their lovely families with the proceeds of the mere stapler. As a result of a global economy and our good fortune to be living in a time of progress and relative peace, we are able to simply head to the store and buy one with our disposable income, which isn’t required to feed and shelter us and our families, but can simply be used for anything we’d like. In ancient history, something as durable, and shiny would have been the property of the village leaders. Today, almost anyone can have one. The metal that the stapler is made of is nearly not physically there, as the distance between sub atomic particles is nearly the distance in scale between two ends of a football stadium. Yet, because of electromagnetism it feels solid, and because of gravity it feels weighty. These amazing facts and ones like them are abundant in everything in our Universe.
The capacity for wonder is built into us. Our place on this Earth is absolutely amazing. Be grateful for your place in this incredible existence, and all of your problems and difficulties will seem to pale in comparision to the absolute amazingness that is going on around you every moment of every day. Learn to appreciate everything. Learn to think carefully about everything in your life, and you will be granted instant happiness. We are all so very fortunate to be born into this world. Take the time for yourself to appreciate it!
