Two Things I Have Found to Be Amazing in the Past Two Days

1) The last thing is first. I watched the local news at 6pm and they covered a story of some kids leaving the slider door open on the back of their house. A bear entered and turned an aquarium over, the fish were still flopping around on the counter, none the worse for wear. It ate some grapes. Something spooked it and it left in a hurry, dropped a large teddy bear on it's way over a stone fence. I saw teddy face down in the grass, must be true.

2)Excerpted from an excerpt (published in The Sun) by Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright, past Czechoslovakian president. He was imprisoned as a dissident before he rose to power & this was taken from a collection of letters to his wife in 1987. He was sitting outside, doing nothing in particular, when . . .

"I seemed to be experiencing, in my mind, a moment of supreme bliss, of infinite joy (all the other important joys, such as the presence of those I love seemed latent in that moment), and though I felt physically intoxicated by it, there was far more to it than that: it was a moment of supreme self-awareness, a supremely elevating state of the soul, a total and totally harmonic merging of existence with itself and with the entire world . . . and yet simultaneously it seems as though one had nothing, that one's happiness were no more than a tragic mirage, with no purpose and leading nowhere . . . this vague anxiety, this breath of infinite nonfulfillment emanating from an experience of the greatest fulfillment, this sensation of terrifying incomprehensibility that blooms in a moment of firmest comprehension, can always be brushed aside like a bothersome piece of fluff. You may wait till the cloud temporarily covering the sun passes by and go on living in peace and delight without asking troublesome questions. But you may also do the opposite: forget about all the "spontaneous meaningfulness" that gave you such intense pleasure, forget about the answer given before the question was posed, and stop precisely at the point where the cold air from the abyss struck you most powerfully--when you felt most intensely that in fact you have nothing, know nothing, and, worst of all, do not even know what you want -- and bravely confront the question that comes to mind in such moments. That is, the genuine, profound, and essentially metaphysical question of the meaning of life.

What's good about today is the ability to be amazed and delighted.