Eating Air
“Mom! Look at me! I'm eating air!” I looked back from the passenger seat to see Ailey’s head thrown back and hair flying everywhere with her mouth wide open, doing just that-
EATING AIR.
It was the picture perfect moment of being care free, of being in the moment and ENJOYING LIFE.
perspective
Her Perspective was everything.
It’s funny how much kids teach you without evening trying. Ailey wasn’t analyzing or mentally pondering deep spiritual concepts or trying to figure out just the right trajectory between the wind and the window and her hair- she was simply enjoying the moment in all its refreshing silly fun.
What we choose to see from out seat in life matters when it comes to perspective. We are always going to have somewhat of a limited vantage point, I mean, not everyone can sit everywhere and see all sides of life all at the same time as much as we'd like to think we can. BUT, we can CAN choose how we see from our seat, whether or not we chose that seat or it was assigned to us.
YOU CHOOSE YOUR VIEW
The funny thing about life and moments is that each of us can experience, view, think, and feel very differently about the exact same situation! I’ve seen people, and have very much done it myself, become angry and irritated and annoyed to the point that their circumstances ruin what could have been a beautiful moment or just a regular moment ( if you don’t wanna get too crazy). I've also seen others take the exact same experience and view it with joy, thankfulness, gratefulness, a challenge, and beautiful.
Our view (our thoughts about fact)s, in Aileys’s case was the fact was the wind was blowing through the van window, will often determine how we feel towards those facts. Those feelings often determine how we act or react
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I believe we are responsible for our thoughts -to change them, and craft and use the ones that are beneficial, and then see how our feelings and actions follow suit.
Often our perspective on life, circumstance, and even our view of people disqualify us from living the life God has for us. We limit and cut short the beauty of this big life when our thoughts, feelings and actions stem from a straight ups stinky attitude.
what are you measuring?
“The only disability in life is a bad attitude”scott hamilton
The well known quote “the only disability in life is a bad attitude” does NOT mean that disability’s don’t exist- they very much do and those with additional needs overcome and fight through more than most of us could ever imagine.
I DO think that more often than not society tries to determine quality of life based on abilities. The problem with that is our measuring stick.
Our measuring stick for QUALITY of life is NOT abilities.
We all have unique abilities that make us different AND the same! I would say that often times those with differing needs have a much higher quality of life than those who don’t. We can get ourselves in a world of trouble when we start to triage people based on our limited view point of what abilities have more worth than others.
Instead, it seems that we should be continually aware of the attitude we have TOWARDS the life that we've been given. The more effective measuring stick would be one that measures our attitude and responses instead of the abilities themselves.
Contagious
The giggles are contagious my friends! ATTITUDE is contagious! WE have the sobering power to shift atmospheres with the attitude we bring! Whether its laughter, hope, or encouragement, wether its a kind smile sent across a room, or bringing a cup of water to the one standing alone in the corner - Our attitude and what we do is cacheable! Send out the good stuff - cuz in my opinion, we've already got a lot of useless unusable unhelpful attitude floating around trying to find something to attach themselves to.
Additional abilities or not, life is worth living and worth seeing through fresh wonder-filled eyes. How bout we do a little less complaining about the messy hair that the wind tangles up and throws in our face, and instead take a note from Ailey's book. Lets throw our head back in the wind with our new and improved perspective, and lets
“Eat the Air!”
