Strive Not

I read this the other day and it spoke to me.

“….the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life.”

Many people spend their whole lives working extremely hard to become rich and actually die before they can enjoy those riches.

I read a story recently …..about a popcorn seller who had a small stand on the street and it was doing very well. A businessman used to stop by the stand everyday to buy a bag in the afternoon to enjoy after his lunch.

One day the seller was closing up early and the businessman was too late to buy his usual bag of popcorn. He asked the seller to reopen and why he was shutting down.

The seller said that he had made enough money for the day so he was closing up early to go home, sit on the porch with his wife, and enjoy a cup of tea.

The businessman said, “WHAT? You are doing so well! You should keep working. You could make even more money if you worked until the end of the day. Then you could open up even more stands, hire more people to work for you, and make even more money. Then you could close up early, go home, sit on the porch with your wife and have tea!”

The seller replied, “ But I am already going to go home and have tea with my wife. I have enough.”

I am paraphrasing from memory here but the idea is that we don’t need an extraordinary amount of money to be happy.

We don’t need to be rich or famous or to even do something else no one else can do.

Our ordinary lives are already….extraordinary!

Literally ‘take time to smell the roses’ . Enjoy that sunset. Savour that freshly picked apple. Marvel at our ability to walk, to dream, to sing!

Let’s strive not to teach our next generation to add to the stress of an already stressful time period …but to seek for the simple beauty in an ordinary life.

There is a man that maketh himself rich, yet he hath nothing: there is a man that maketh himself poor, yet he hath great riches. Proverbs 13:7