The Warmth Of Life

"When I was a boy, I use to stare at the sun. I use to stare at the sun to see if I could see its origins. I would stare at the sun for so long and so often, that its warmth scorched my eyes. I stared at the sun so frequently, that its brightness, stole my sight and left me in darkness.
Now I live in darkness, stumbling over my ignorance of why I did what I did. Though my world is one of sustained darkness, I still feel the warmth of the sun. I'm not angry at the sun for taking my sight away, nor am I angry at myself for being too curious of where the sun comes from. Some say, I was stupid for staring at the sun and that's why I lost my sight. That's all in the past now, although I am reminded each day of the mistake that I made in staring at the sun. There are those who can see everything, yet understand very little of what they saw. There are some who stare at the unfortunate circumstances of others and comment negative things, even though they have little knowledge of that person's plight. I forgive myself for being foolish in staring at the sun, but I could never forgive myself for my curiosity of the sun's origin. I smile each day that I'm given no matter how terrible others tell me it is, because I'm still grateful for the warmth of the sun."
An excerpt from Curthom.

No matter how difficult our circumstances seem to be to us, there is always someone, somewhere who has it worse. We shouldn't celebrate the fact that there is someone worse off then ourself, but rejoice in the reality that we have much to be grateful for and quite often it is a humbling experience. Just the other day I was murmuring about the fact that I didn't have enough petrol to get to class and had to walk. Well it rained quite heavily that morning and even though I had set out early to class, I was soaking wet and quite cold. The air conditioned classroom made it unbearable for me at first, so I went to the restroom and took off all of my clothing in the handicap stall and rung out all of my clothing and put them back on.

When I arrived back to class, I saw that many of the students had not shown up yet and the teacher announced that one of the students had an accident and wouldn't be attending the class for a while. I didn't think much about it during the class until the walk half-way home. The sun shined all afternoon and was the complete opposite of the weather on my walk to class. I kept wondering what caused the student to have the accident? Was it the weather? Were they rushing because they were late to class? Did a driver run the traffic signal? I didn't know, but I was hoping that they were going to be okay.

Arriving home after the walk to and from class, I was grateful that I was healthy enough to go the distance to and from class without stopping to rest or collapsing along the way. It was only six miles or so, but it had been a long time since I've walked six miles and it seemed more like 12 miles each way due to my aching legs and feet. The first mile seem to go on forever and the more I concentrated on the negative, my having to walk, the more grueling the walk became. After about the second mile I was famished and would have paid anything for an ice cold soda pop and then the rain came. First as little drops, you know the kind of drops that makes you think that a bird just took a leak from above and about ten minutes later, came the rain with a vengeance. I got so wet, so quickly, that my shoes were making sucking sounds before I could find cover to stand under. I couldn't really wait out the rain so I continued my journey to class arriving early enough to try to dry out some. I was so happy that I made it to class and I didn't burn any gasoline getting there and back that I treated myself to a baseball cap from the one of the many thrift stores on the way home. The baseball cap cost less than a gallon of gas, in fact the cap cost about a fourth of the price of a gallon of gas. All and all, I've learned not to fret over things that I can not change and look for the good in everything, including the circumstances we find ourselves in sometimes, because the world is a big place and there is always someone who is worse off then ourself. My experiences living here and abroad have taught me to celebrate the good in all of us, even though it may take some effort and action to achieve it. So in summary, what did I learned in class that day? Well, it was an Economics Class and this is what I gathered from it, that there are things in business that happen that we can not predict or forecast and it costs the parties involved time, money or opportunity and when it happens, Economics refers to it as an "externality," but in most of our worlds, we simply call it, "Life."

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