Taking Things for Granted Is Part of Life

How many things and people do we take for granted in life? And once they are gone, we miss them dearly and wish that we could go back in time to develop a larger appreciation for what we missed. But days continue to roll carefully and neatly into the ball of time, never to unravel again.

While rioting against the capitalist system, young people want to destroy the society which gives all of us necessities like clean water, plenty of good and affordable food, and shelter. They burn and loot the neighborhoods of poor people, often destroying their ability to feed and shelter their families. Electricity, heating, and hot water are things that these rioters take for granted and do not think about the consequences of having to survive without them.

People take for granted the ability to walk, to run, to swim, to exercise, to breathe without oxygen or medication. They are gifts that we never appreciate enough. Nor do we appreciate good health until it’s strained or endangered.

We take for granted friends, families, and loved ones. We have less time to spend with them and, when their support and companionship are gone, we realize how much we have lost because we were too busy to make time. We take for granted daily comforts and the small joys of life as if they will exist forever.

We never appreciate the freedom to make choices, to pursue an education, to travel, to have a job because we do not know how other people in the world live or whether they have the simplest joy of drinking clean water and having a place to sleep without the danger of being robbed by humans or attacked by wild animals.

We take for granted that our environment is safe and, when natural disasters strike, we are saddened by fear and loss, by the sudden destruction of what we used to call safe. We realized at that moment that the threat of natural disasters was not part of our lives, but it existed, nevertheless.  People in Venezuela were struck by two back-to-back earthquakes, and their lives became a nightmare. They thought Mother Nature would always be placid.

A near miss on the road and a close brush with a dangerous animal in the ocean or in the wilderness leaves us with a reeling horror because we took our lives and safety for granted.

Simple pleasures like feeling the warmth of sunlight, hearing the chirping of birds in the woods, watching the cotton clouds move in the blue sky, having a cup of tea on the porch on a frosty morning are often ignored in the rush of life.

We take for granted the ability to shower, to stand without feeling vertigo, to dress comfortably in clean clothes folded nicely in a drawer, smelling like soap and the summer wind.

Taking things for granted is part of life but we should stop and reconsider before it’s too late.