“We never think it can happen to us until it does.”
- Anonymous

In a world of want and desire, where we see wealth and extravagance more often than struggle and poverty; it becomes notoriously easy to take the genuine privileges that we enjoy on a daily basis for granted. I could tell you how something as ‘small’ as having food on the table or clothes on your back is a MONUMENTAL blessing that MANY on this planet wish they had. Or I could tell you how your worries about life and work are signs of even more blessings in your life compared to someone out there somewhere, fighting for their next breath. These are all very real and very possible situations that anyone can find themselves in, this including me and you. It’s nothing new, you’ve heard the tale many times before, but does it actually change something in you? How long does it take you to lose sight of the picture and go back to your thoughts on how that client hasn’t paid you yet, or how your boss is an a**? How long before you’re complaining about how hard it is to find something to watch on Netflix or that fact that the WiFi is down? If you’re anything like me — which I believe many are — it doesn’t take that long at all.

So then, what’s the problem? What are we missing?

Well, I’d like to think it’s a matter of PERSPECTIVE. Hear me out.

You wake up in the morning and get your routine going. You hop out of bed, freshen up, maybe pour yourself some coffee or tea or whatever, get a workout in, take a shower, have some breakfast and get on with your day — whatever that entails. Throughout your day, you feed your mind with all kinds of information relating to your work, interests, private thoughts, dreams, ideas and ambitions. Sometimes it’s just plain entertainment for entertainment’s sake; it’s human, there’s nothing wrong with any of it. But let me ask you this, how much of what you consume daily paints a picture of grandeur and glamour, and how much of it paints one of despair and despondency? Chances are it’s a pretty huge discrepancy. And therein lies the problem.

You can’t fill your mind with images of lavish lives and intimidating moments of success all day and expect to be in tune with the feeling of contentment. That one saddening story that finds its way into our spectrum every other day if not once in a while, doesn’t do enough to truly impart the knowledge of how blessed we are. It takes maintaining a state of consumption consciousness that empowers us to be aware of what it is we are feeding our minds consistently, both based on external stimuli and on our private thought processes. It takes auditing what we are putting into our minds as well as the effects that this information has on our psychology and physiology. It takes making an effort to strike a balance between images of opulence and images of destitution.

Is it a challenging task? You bet your beautiful a** it is! But nothing worth doing isn’t.