Welcome to Living a Life of Gratitude.
I'm Sarah Wiseman.
The container of our lives.
What makes our lives important is that they are finite.
We are born into the world.
It's the only entrance possible.
Someday we'll die.
It's our only way out.
In between,
We are each given a container of days,
Years,
Or decades that is the sum of our lives.
Some of us will get an easy life.
Others will face challenge after challenge.
To a certain point,
We create our own experience by the choices we make,
What we choose to do or not do.
But much of what happens is divine destiny,
A trajectory through time that we neither can predict nor fully understand.
Such is the mystery.
As we move from birth to death,
Our challenge is to make something meaningful of our lives.
On the surface,
Most of us do.
We make progress in a career,
Get married,
Create a family,
Travel the world,
Or complete any of the other milestones we might consider adult.
And it's not all that hard either,
For what seems like an insurmountable challenge at age 20 or 30 often becomes a reality by midlife.
The achieving of success just took time.
Getting up in the morning to the six o'clock alarm,
Slamming back coffee and blasting off to the office,
The work site,
Or to take care of the kids at home.
Lather,
Rinse,
Repeat.
Day after day,
We do the dance.
Our to-do lists get bigger and more complicated.
Over time,
Success comes.
We have a job,
A place to live,
A family,
Whatever the particular emblems of adulthood you choose to wear.
Or if we don't choose to have any of these,
We create a life busy with experiences,
Trips to far-off places,
Adventures.
It's good to work.
It's good to have a family.
It's good to do adventures.
Yet at a certain point,
We realize that in order to experience life at a deeper level,
We must focus on something quite a bit bigger.
The great saints and holy ones teach us to look at the trajectory of our lives as a process of soul growth,
The divine self in human body,
Facing all that humans face,
Turning continually away from petty mundane perspective to spiritual perspective.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what we're going to do next,
What we're going to create next,
Who we want to be with next,
Where we want to travel next.
And when we put our minds to it,
We accomplish these things to a degree.
But the true meaning of our lives is not about houses or family or trips to Nepal.
By the time we reach a certain age,
Whether it's 34,
48,
Or 93,
We'll have a slew of accomplishments and experiences under our belt.
But when we look back,
We'll be shocked at how quickly time has passed.
All those six o'clock alarms and in the blink of the eye,
Our life has been lived.
Many times we may have been past thinking or future thinking so very much,
So busy out there amassing things and people and adventures that we've forgotten to enjoy what's right in front of us in each moment.
We're each given a container.
The container we receive is a part of our soul agreement,
Our divine destiny.
In this time between birth and death,
We have a chance to live as fully ourselves as we can dare to be.
In this container,
We have the chance to be awake to both gravitas and the joy of our lives and to become grateful beyond understanding.
What are the most meaningful ways you have filled the container of your life?
What are the least important?
If you had 10 years left to live,
What would you do differently?
Five years?
20?
Consider your container today and how you would like to fill it.
Yep.
Yep.
