a short meditation on being lucky

Old and New

View of Churchyard

I heard about a man who went into hospital expecting to come out better but finds he has days to live.   He is frightened and described as panicking and his story has made me consider the great gift of being alive, of being well, of having a roof over my head, of having company and enough food and even more of being free.  It is so easy to find something to complain about; the weather, the electricity, the government, the driver in front of you, the way people behave in general and in particular and everything considered in relation to you as a most important individual.  It isn't until that individual life is called into question that you might just look around and see what fortune has bestowed on you.  We are in a small cottage in Suffolk which we have had in our family for 40 years!  It is packed with our memories, times with children playing outside, going down on the farmer's tractor to the marshes in the morning, swimming in the brown North Sea and bicycling over the flat East Anglian landscape but beyond our memories, there are years of people who have been born, lived and died here, gone to school here, shopped here, holidayed here under the huge East Anglian sky.  Our lives are really deeply insignificant in some ways, significant only in what we do with them and who we owe them to. Significant in remembering to thank God or our neighbour for simply being.

Even the words have faded