There is a Zen saying: “Before enlightenment, the mountain is just a mountain. During enlightenment, the mountain is not a mountain. After enlightenment, the mountain is just a mountain.” When we see the extraordinary in the ordinary we never see the ordinary in the same way again.
The Mountain is Just a Mountain
Take something as ordinary as a status line. Some of us drop a few words in there everyday and think nothing of it. Sometimes we report on what we are doing. Sometimes we make a joke. Sometimes we advocate for a cause. Most days we see it as a little space to fill with something, anything. The mountain is just a mountain.
The Mountain is Not a Mountain
Every so often we become aware of what it is we have at our fingertips. We wake up and see we are given this little space which, with a few key strokes, we could change a heart, start a movement, or contribute to solving a grave problem.
Before the bit of white space that is the status line we are given a choice, what will we write?
One Wild and Precious Life
The poet, Mary Oliver, describes a day spent idling in a field, a day in which her attention is narrowed down to the chewing of a grasshopper. At the end of her poem, The Summer Day, she asks, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I am reminded that a couple of minutes of my “one wild and precious life” is lived before the status line.
‘You’ World Central
This morning my wife, Linda, asked me to help her with something. She said, “Do it before you get on to another of your projects!” I laughed and joked: “Baby, my life is one big project. I sit in the middle of Jim World Central.”
I was just kidding. First there is a mountain.
Then, I realized: I do sit in the middle of Jim World Central! Then the mountain is not a mountain…..
You sit in the middle of ‘You’ World Central.
Technology puts you in the middle of it…and that for free! You are not the consumer of information. You are the publisher of information. You are not a donor. You are a relief agency. You are not a part of everyone else’s story. You are the story teller. You sit in the middle of ‘You’ World Central…
So tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life, your one wild and precious moment, your one wild and precious status line?
The Blessed 2 Bless Network 