A Friendly Reminder

Cancer. I overheard someone this morning talking about a relative who had been taken off treatment as it was inevitable the cancer was going to soon take her life. The woman is young, spending as many hours as she can with her two children and husband.

There it was. Here I had been sitting here pondering over how tired I was from lifting earlier this morning and here it was; my friendly reminder that I haven't got jack shit to complain about. It comes every once in a while and usually comes when the thought had escaped my mind, as it usually does once I start worrying about my own important little life again.

Over and over again, the cycle continues. I get reminded that I need to stop worrying about my petty problems, but over time I begin to worry again, but those moments come once more and remind me of my shitty attitude. Reading this you may be beginning to think the same thing. The fact that your Starbuck's Iced Caramel Machiatto had just a little too much milk? Seems pretty damn insignificant when you think about the starving young boy on the other side of the planet who would eat shit if he could just to survive.

You and me need to get our priorities in check. What does it mean to live in such a way as to respect the notion that you should be grateful though? To be grateful means to be aware of the fact that things could be different, and maybe, just maybe you had the luck enough to be put on this planet with an ounce of charity. What are you doing with it though? We can get certain gifts out of life by just being born, some more than others, some not at all. A random variable. What's the x factor though? What is that determining factor that can help us live a grateful life no matter what the random variable handed out to us?

I recently attended a speech given by a holocaust concentration camp survivor. She spoke of many of the horrible atrocities that occurred which need not be repeated here again. She was one hell of a friendly reminder that anything hard I had ever gone through paled in comparison to what other people have and will have to go through. Her mission however dealt with spreading the notion of acceptance among the world. It was one of the reasons she was able to survive; she became passionate about something.

It is through this passion that she came to survive and how she comes to respect and be grateful for her life. Founder of Elite Fitness Systems (http://elitefts.com/) Dave Tate uses passion as one of his tools for teaching a person how to be successful, in lifting, business and life. Passion becomes the factor that determines whether or not a person will survive the hard times and whether or not they will persist in their dreams.

You don't necessarily need to keep in mind 24/7 that you should be more grateful about your life. To be passionate about what you are currently doing shows that you are grateful, because the passionate ones know how life comes to unfold. Passion is the action which reflects your respect for life. As long as you are passionate about life you will find that when those moments come, those friendly reminders, you will smile and know that you are living a life that sees the importance of remaining grateful.

Mitchell Sahlfeld