Ten
Percent
“Life is
10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it.”
Irving
Berlin
Maybe it's old age; maybe
the brain gets soft after all the years of straining, but this
realization, as stated so simply by Irving Berlin, is absolute truth.
What hindsight shows us is that we spend a great portion of our
precious time here on planet earth trying to make life look the way we
think it should. We maneuver, and manipulate, and twist our
circumstances in every direction in an effort to make those we love,
and those we don't love, do what we want them to do. We spend countless
years, even decades, expending life-energy in the effort to be the
master of our fate. And some of us succeed for some of the time. But
life has a way of unfolding on its own no matter what we do. That's
why “how you take it” matters.
For some reason, we
humans are given to holding strong ideas about life's purpose and
fulfillment. Other animals don't do that, of course. They just take
each day as it comes. Dog-Liza, for instance, has woken-up, stretched, peed,
eaten her breakfast and is now curled up on the porch sofa having her
first nap of the day. She's like a hobbit—there's first nap, second
nap, bark at the dogs next door, third nap, and so on. I'm not sure
our super-large brains have served us so well. It's true that our
insane drive to control has gotten us to Mars, mapped the human
genome, and formulated vaccines for most childhood diseases. It's not
in the sphere of higher intelligence that we seem to struggle—its
managing our lower intelligence—the one that wants to control other
people and circumstances in order to serve some notion of what is
“supposed to be.”
In our endless search for
happiness, we seem to have forgotten how to be...well...happy.
Content, satisfied, okay with life as it is, as it is going to
be—ever changing, ever evolving, sometimes comfortable, sometimes
challenging, sometimes hard as the dickens. Imagine waking up every
day excited to see what comes next. What will happen today? If I just
get out of the way—if I just do my 10% and let life do its 90%--who
knows where it may lead. That is the adventure of a human lifetime.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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