Daily Gratitude: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

This is great. It’s a simple summary of how we should live each day. We should pay attention to as much as we can. That doesn’t mean to become easily distractible. It means to get out of ourselves. We usually live in a mall. Huh? Yes, a big fancy mall with no windows, doors at either end, and lots of shops.

We park our cars (get up in the morning) and head for a door to the mall (our life that day). Once inside we are pretty sure we know where we want to go. So. We don’t bother with the directory. If we did take even a short glance at it, we’d see many different options for us to explore and perhaps enrich our day. But, no. We traipse along, head down, hoping other people aren’t staring at us, and make our way to the Apple Store (our destination for today’s segment of life).

Once at the Apple Store we conduct our business interacting with other people perhaps, viewing all the bright shiny objects, and most importantly, checking our trusty Apple Watch to see if it’s time to go home.

At lunch we don’t even go outside. We take the escalator to the Food Court, and grab the same old dull processed lunch we had yesterday. We don’t consider another store. That would involve decisions and right then making decisions seems too hard.

Back to the Apple Store to finish out the day – 8 or more hours inside this mall, doing the same thing hour after hour. Breathing the same air over and over (supposedly it’s “recycled”), things feel stuffy.

It’s time to head home and out we go to our car. We’re surprised that it’s rained. And it seems there may have been some flash flooding (imagine you’re in Texas for this scenario).

But you’re so tired that all you care about is whether your route home is blocked. You don’t care about accidents that have happened, people who have been stranded. You just want to get home so you can start the entire routine again.

What did you pay attention to? What were you astonished by? Whom did you tell about your day?

Can you take one day or one portion of a day and skip the mall of life and go to the park (doing a hobby, perhaps)? Once you’re there, can you pay attention and find one thing to be astonished about (it may take some time but it’s possible)? And then go tell others about it?