Each day can be a miracle if we choose to take the time to notice and appreciate it. We can shape our experiences in the way we perceive our realities.
I was talking with a friend last night about how those pesky things like emotional baggage seem to follow us around. There is no escaping from ourselves. How easily I forget this truth, even though I have learned many times. While I shed a couple of pretty big layers these past couple of years, this doesn’t translate into instant happiness. There is still important work to be done.
My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to learn how to be alone without being overtaken by loneliness and melancholia. When I was very young, I played alone for hours and was completely content. In my adult life, I struggle when I am alone. thoughts of what might be missing seem to seep in, reminders of people and places I have left behind. It is almost like my mind needs to find something missing to fixate on rather than focusing on the positive, joyful elements I experience each day in my present reality.
My friend mentioned a course he took on the subject of miracles. He told me, “A miracle is shifting our awareness of reality”. It is an awareness of change. Nothing objectively or externally changes in the reality of our world. There is no real difference. We continue doing the exact same thing in the exact same place in the exact same situation in the world. The miracle is that we just view it differently. It is a change in awareness of your focus.
He likened this learned awareness to a magic eye. These were very popular when I was in middle school. There were entire books with pages of images hidden beneath many layers of dots, stripes, etc. You had to change the way you focus your eyes for the image to reveal itself. As you relaxed your eyes, the image became blurred until all of a sudden, a hidden image jumped off the page—a boat or lighthouse. Something simple—a perfectly clear image you couldn’t see before. Now that you found it, it seemed so evident. Yet it took work to find it, and it was easy to lose the image and have to start all over. Over time, the ease and speed in refocusing and finding the image increased.
This exercise was a training of the mind to spend time learning and practicing awareness.
Becoming aware of birds has been this way for me. I have had to retrain my mind and senses to notice their existence. My entire reality has been shaped in learning this awareness. Birds have always been there, yet I never paid attention to them. Now that I have spent years watching and listening to them, I can’t imagine a world without them.
life of m 