Blog 2360 – 04.10.2022

Our Full Attention

There is a line in one of my favorite movies, 2005’s An Unfinished Life, one of those movies I have watched so many times that I have it almost memorized, but still love to watch it again and again. Mitch Bradley, played by Morgan Freeman, is the lifelong friend and cowboy companion of Einar Gilkyson, played by Robert Redford, who owns a beautiful ranch in Wyoming. Mitch was mauled by a bear a year or so before the movie begins and is living daily with excruciating pain from his injuries, pain so intense and unrelenting that he must take injections of morphine just to be able to bear it. Einar asks him in the beginning of the movie, first thing in the morning, “How is the pain?” to which Mitch replies, “It gets my full attention.”

We all would like to avoid such pain, but pain is a part of life and try hard as we can to avoid it or to distract ourselves from it, inevitably it gets our full attention. I submit to you as I have in a number of blogs that as the little children’s round plainly says, “Life is but a dream.” and that the best way to live it is “fully awake ” and giving it our full attention.

Since as another song, The Circle of Life, says “There is far too much to take in here, more to do than can ever be done” it behooves us to pay attention and thereby get the most out of life by giving it our best shot, giving it all we’ve got.

Beauty, pain, bells, trumpets, and even that still small voice all agree as one and ever remind us to, “”Awake, oh sleeper.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14O1HMatu2JMQ-SixIvcjhLC3A7vmFt5B/view?usp=drivesdk

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