John Cali
As I was walking home this morning from my daily jog, I started thinking about the various religious celebrations marking this week: Passover (today), Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.
I grew up in a large Italian, Roman Catholic family. For us, this week was a time of religious celebrations, solemn and joyous.
It was also a time of celebration because my family all got together. At Easter they usually cracked open the barrels of wine they’d made the year before. And, as you might imagine, that in itself was reason enough to celebrate. Not that they needed an excuse. They really knew how to celebrate every day!
As I got older and grew apart from Catholicism, the religious significance of the week diminished for me. But the sense of celebration did not.
Today my family is much smaller and more scattered. And this week is not markedly different from any other of my weeks. Partly because of the legacy my family’s older generation left to us younger ones, I now see every week, every day as a time of celebration.
Every day is a grand opportunity to find something, many things, to appreciate. Every day is a grand opportunity, unique and special, to find the joy which, as Spirit says, is there in every one of our experiences. Whether we view those as experiences as positive or negative, there is joy to be found in all of them.
Every day is a day to celebrate.
You’ll find Spirit’s thoughts below.
Spirit
Do you know what your life’s purpose is? We are asked that question often. “What is my life’s purpose? Please tell me!” And almost always, the asking of the question is tinged with despair, frustration, even anger. It’s as if you see your lives as purposeless–senseless, insane, chaotic existences with one trauma and disaster after another.
And yet it need not be so.
Your natural state–the state your soul, before you incarnated, intended you to live in–is a state of deep joy, of passionate fulfillment, of an endless series of one wondrous experience after another–day to day, week to week, year to year, lifetime to lifetime.
That was your soul’s intent. And yet relatively few of you are living out that intent, that dream. That, neither, needs to be so.
There is joy in every present moment of your lives. Still, so many of you miss it–you don’t even know it’s there. It IS there, in every experience, whether those experiences are painful or blissful. Something good is to be gained from every experience–EVERY one, no exceptions.
And so how do you mine this gold we call joy?
You mine it, first of all, by acknowledging it’s there. Do you think your gold seekers in the days of the American Old West would have rushed to the gold fields if they didn’t believe there was gold “in them thar hills”?
The second and most critical step is to simply seek the gold–seek the joy. There is always some gold there, in every day of your life, in every experience of every day of your life. But you have to look for it.
Look for the positives. Look for the good in others. Look for the good in yourselves. Pay absolutely no attention to what others are doing and experiencing, especially if their lives are filled with pain and turmoil. Their choices do not have to be your choices. Their pain does not have to be your pain. Their path does not have to be your path. You will do well to take the less travelled path.
Find a reason–no matter how small or large–to celebrate something, anything, in your life each day. When you wake up each morning, before you even get out of bed, promise yourself you are going to find something good in the day before you. Promise yourself to look for the gold.
If you look for it you WILL find it. And the more of it you find, the more of it the Universe will deliver to you.
It is that simple. Every day is a day to celebrate.
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