The Miracles Keep On Coming

The Miracles Keep On Coming

Regard all that you see as a miracle and you won't be far wrong.  I take everything for granted some days, but now and then a moment like this arrives and I'm charmed into seeing things afresh.  I look out my window, a thousand miles from where I was born and wonder at it all.  I spent the first half of this day helping our daughter, whose only failing seems to be being unable to be in two places at once.  On those rare occasions we back her up.  I look at what she does and wonder how she grew up from the tiny girl we met thirty-some years ago (another miracle we took for granted just a little when she came along).

I spoke to my son after texting him a series of messages about a transaction he sought my advice on while he is trying to do it for the first time.  Unbelievably, he is taking my advice.  An exchange like the one we have had in the past fourteen hours would have taken weeks when I was born.  Today, we did it in mere hours, and we both slept eight of those.

He works aboard ships that carry thousands of "containers" packed with goods from around the world.  When I was in high school, container shipping had not yet been conceived and begun.  Now, he and his co-workers routinely move hundreds of containers on and off ships from all over the world, in a port that once welcomed ships loaded with rocks and loaded them with bales of cotton, in quantities that his crews handle in a week.  How did he come to be here?

I sit at a desk and write my thoughts on a small machine that will shortly allow my words to reach around the world in a minute or so.  Yes, the statistics portion of this little blog tells me that people in Australia, Europe, Russia, Asia and South America have from time to time visited  these pages.  Heaven only knows why....

In an hour or two, we will sit down to eat fish caught in Alaska and shipped to us here, less than five days out of their habitat (if you believe the accounts of sellers of said fish).  More likely our wild caught Alaskan salmon will have been frozen at sea, sometimes within minutes of being caught, and kept so until it was thawed for sale as "fresh" here a few thousand miles away.  Regardless, this frozen-at-sea fish is as good as if not better than the actual fresh that arrives thawed, but five days out of the sea.  Now, in my lifetime, this salmon is available for us to enjoy year-round.  All there was when I was a kid was canned salmon, which was nothing short of awful.   I don't want to sound like a spokesperson for the food industry, but what we will have for dinner tonight is a marvel.

I realize I have chosen the miracles I describe here in a most haphazard way, but here are the ones that got me thinking on this subject when I sat down to write.

When I trudge up the stairs tonight, I'll pour out the four different meds I take each night to make my life better through the miracle of sleep.  With my medical condition, I would have little or no sleep at night and the three meds I take each morning when I roll out of bed would not prevent me from having a miserable day, if for no other reason than that sleepless night.  Yet, these medicines, which neither cure nor slow the growth of the condition that challenges my nervous system, allow me to take Yoga on Monday, Pilates on Wednesday, Tai Chi on Friday, play golf on one of the days in between and walk the beach or ride my bicycle on most days.  That's a miracle, a boat load of miracles.  On days like today, I remember to be grateful, a totally inadequate gesture in the face of all these miracles.