the little things

“Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘it’s very beautiful over there’. I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.”

John Green in “Looking for Alaska”

As I looked around me, I realised how much of life I had taken for granted. Maybe not every aspect. Not the tears, the sleepless nights, the panic attacks and the heartbreaks. Maybe not the worries, the regrets and all the relationships I had lost. But, as I stared at my bare walls, I realised all the beautiful things that I had let slip past my fingers. In that moment of realisation, I sat and I cried. I cried over everything I could have appreciated, everything that was so simple and beautiful that I had missed. Birds chirping on a spring morning, the feeling of buying a new book, the smell of fresh coffee; these were all things I hadn’t ever appreciated. I suppose the biggest take away of life isn’t how long it lasts, but what you do with the living.

[ a quick thought ]