SUNRISE - January 15, 2011

"You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough."  - Joe E. Lewis

January 15, 20121 - Sunrise 7:22 am

Ah, a three day weekend.  MLK Day or Martin Luther King memorial holiday. We have been granted an extra day on Monday to add to the weekend.  Does that in itself imply we gained TIME?  Does that mean we have, somehow,‘more’ TIME?  Not really of course, we have just dipped into the “have-to go-to-work-this-week jar” and plucked out one-fifth of the contents and plopped it into the “whoopee…my-time-is-my-own” jar. Same amount of time - different jars.

Just as the statement: “The TRUTH is what we perceive it to be”, is a universal known factor in how we guide ourselves through the wilderness, we mentally accept the fact that borrowed time is somehow newly created time.  Unfortunately, not true.   Each of us can, however, change our view of time with a subtle little twist of our mental kaleidoscope. Adding mousse to our hair doesn't create hair, if merely gives chemical volume and the appearance of more hair. A magic trick.  This is true of 'gained' and 'lost' minutes daily; added and plucked from one project to another.

When a person is diagnosed with Cancer, they are given the odds on how long the current statistics indicate they are likely to survive.  One, two –three years perhaps only a month.  One year is an eternity if trapped in a cave with bees, but just a flashing nanosecond when there is much living, yet to do.   

In cooking you would describe the challenge of looking at your flavoring ingredients; individually destined for a certain taste, but deciding to apply personal, intentional efforts to 'create' something unique and different with what you have been given, by making a beautiful reduction sauce…applying intense heat – (boiling) to your sauce in an open skillet to cause the flavors to become stronger and intensify by boiling away the unnecessary water and liquids.  This application creates a totally different result than if the very same ingredients were not intentionally altered, thereby producing an improved result.  

 Often, when a Cancer patient is very, very, very lucky, they beat the odds and live beyond the diagnosed number of days the doctor allotted to them.  Wouldn't one use the same concept with their ingredients in life as they would in their kitchen?  Would they intensify or dilute the flavoring?   

They now have a finite amount of time in their life to use as they wish, from catching up on all the past episodes of ‘General Hospital’ to skydiving naked over the Napa Valley.   

For personal enlightenment, they probably should not do so much of the former, but a lot that is pretty darn close to the latter.

rlw

“Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.”   George Eliot