The Opportunity of Today

Wrap your mind around this, I’m sitting in my living room working on my computer in Federal Way – out my sliding glass doors my little garden has 4” of snow (refer to Seattle Christmas blog entry), icy roads, school closures and Monday I fly out to Melbourne, Australia (presently upper 90’s F!!!). I’m only there a few days and head to Cambodia (sweat capital of Asia). Life is never boring.

I remember one autumn day a few years back, I was camping on a mountain ridge with my dad. We were deer hunting and it was soooooo cold! At sunrise we got up to a skiff of snow on the ground and huddled around a fire eating breakfast before heading out. I remember thinking “This time next week I’ll be speaking to kids at a campground on an extinct volcano in Hawaii and it’ll be in the 80’s.” Weird, huh?

It’s funny looking at the future thru the eyes of the present. Sometimes I can look at a child and see them as an adult. And I think, “Those same mannerisms, moods, likes and dislikes are all there now that you can see as an adult.” The only difference is people will notice them then. For the present, most adults will miss the little person standing in front of them. They don’t think “This is the bank teller I’ll be dealing with, the doctor I’ll be consulting, the teacher, the accountant, the manager, the homeless person, the drug addict, the criminal I’ll hear about on the news.” One thing about looking at the future thru the eyes of the present, it gives you a heightened appreciation of the precious opportunity of “now”! What are you doing with today’s opportunity?

Ponder: In Chinese the characters for “crises” are “”danger” + “opportunity”