How You See It

Once upon a time, an older man took a younger man on a truck dri­ving les­son. At the end of the day, the old man was calm and relaxed. The young man was a ner­vous wreck. The old man says to the young man, “The dif­fer­ence between me and you is that today you went to work — while I went for a drive.”

Life is all about how you see it. Turn your work into play and you have it made. Make a menial task into an adven­ture and it goes from being a chore to being an insight­ful jour­ney. Today is either a rou­tine or an exper­i­ment. It is up to you. If you want to have fun, it is an exper­i­ment. If you pre­fer a mind­less state, then it is just another rou­tine day. It is a choice you make when you first open your eyes.

Me? I pre­fer to inter­pret life with rich verbs. I fre­quently “stand at the cross­roads of doubt and deter­mi­na­tion.” I am not merely mak­ing a deci­sion. Every­thing has eter­nal con­se­quences. What I do — even in the small­est action — is a state­ment about my phi­los­o­phy of life. I see a greater pur­pose every­where. No con­ver­sa­tion is triv­ial. Any expres­sion is of the soul — not just the noise of pass­ing the time.

How we see what hap­pens is far more impor­tant than what hap­pens. We are inter­pre­tive crea­tures. We learn as we go. We also frame what we see by choice. If we are mis­er­able, it is because we have cho­sen a neg­a­tive way of see­ing what hap­pens to us.

Today is just another day, or it is an trip into the mind of God itself. Which do you pre­fer? Per­son­ally, I have a col­lec­tion of “mys­tery verbs” that keep me look­ing at the most mun­dane events with a sense of awe. As a result, I wake up each day with a sense of pos­i­tive won­der and I go to bed with a sense of hav­ing had a reflec­tive adven­ture. It is all in how you see it.