We were discussing this a bit in the office today, while reviewing and debating the latest daily events at our company and thought it was worth sharing. Sometimes you just have to step back from the hectic busyness of each day and take a moment to express gratitude for what we have and the times we live in. A few things to be grateful for:

• We live in one of the most prosperous, freest societies on the planet

• We are living in the golden age of man kind. Witness to the greatest technological innovation in history, dwarfing all previous periods in richness, scale, and complexity. All while benefiting from being the longest lived, healthiest people to ever live.

• We have unlimited information at our fingertips at an instant. Your smartphone can access information that would dwarf the Library of Alexandria.

• A too large portion of the world lives on $1-2 per day. Has limited access to clean water, lives in poverty, lacks education, and is subject to all manners of disease that most of us do not even have to consider.

It seems like at times all people have an all to great capacity to take things for granted. To use one accomplishment as stepping stone for larger, greater accomplishment. Take a step back, a deep breath, and use your perspective to express some gratitude for all that we have. The poet Derek Mahan expressed this beautifully in his poem Everything is Going to Be All Right:

Everything Is Going to Be All Right

How should I not be glad to contemplate

the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window

and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?

There will be dying, there will be dying,

but there is no need to go into that.

The poems flow from the hand unbidden

and the hidden source is the watchful heart.

The sun rises in spite of everything

and the far cities are beautiful and bright.

I lie here in a riot of sunlight

watching the day break and the clouds flying.

Everything is going to be all right.

Derek Mahon

Source: http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Everything_Is_Going_to_Be_All_Right.html