Straddling the threshold

At some point, the miraculous became mundane. Sooner or later, the novelty wore off. Whether it was falling in love with your new puppy or mastering driving a ton of metal surrounding a container of highly flammable gasoline at 60 miles an hour opposite someone doing the same thing in your direction, eventually you crossed the threshold from a fresh, new, exciting experience to living with the commonplace. Familiarity set in. Whether it breeds contempt, as Chaucer mused, or merely boredom, as 14 months of a worldwide pandemic may have wrought in your life, it’s a reality of mastery.

When you were young, every day was full of wonderful new challenges to meet. Learning to walk! Understanding language. Speaking language! Feeding yourself. Riding a bike, catching a ball, throwing a bulls-eye. But once you mastered these skills – necessary skills, indeed – you move on. You’re familiar. You don’t even look back at the wonder, at the miracle, or at the moment you went from the unknown and crossed the threshold to unfamiliar, and stepped fully into the understood and integrated, which ultimately became the ordinary.

But, here’s the good news: the miracle of wonder is always available to you, because every time you notice the ordinary, you can turn back and look over the threshold and delight in the miracle. Here’s a list of ordinary events that were once a miracle – so, you can take a moment, look back and appreciate, with gratitude, the remarkableness of all that you can do.

• Walking down a staircase

• Listening to a bird sing

• Becoming emotional from reading a poem or book

• Watching lightning bugs

• Be comforted by an animal

• Feeding yourself

• Laughing

• Loving

Miracles are just across the threshold – in either direction. Balance yourself there, look forward with determination and back with appreciation, and value your remarkable life.

Peace and love to you in the week ahead.