For whatever reason, my Honda Accord was burning oil.
Fearful of driving around without some SAE 5W-20 at hand, I swung into the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Inside, I bought the oil. It was midafternoon, I’d skipped breakfast and lunch, and I was hungry. In the deli I found a glass case displaying various sandwiches. I selected what Wal-Mart describes as its “Traditional American Submarine Sandwich,” paid the cashier for my purchases, stowed the oil in the trunk of my car, and ate half the sandwich driving through the prettiest day of the fall.
With the sandwich came a small epiphany.
Fearful of driving around without some SAE 5W-20 at hand, I swung into the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Inside, I bought the oil. It was midafternoon, I’d skipped breakfast and lunch, and I was hungry. In the deli I found a glass case displaying various sandwiches. I selected what Wal-Mart describes as its “Traditional American Submarine Sandwich,” paid the cashier for my purchases, stowed the oil in the trunk of my car, and ate half the sandwich driving through the prettiest day of the fall.
With the sandwich came a small epiphany.
Here I was, whipping along at 65 miles per hour in a climate-controlled Japanese designed car, chowing down on a delicious sandwich—hunger, the old saying runs, is the best spice—and having just shambled through a vast emporium featuring everything from paint to produce.
And the epiphany? A sweeping rush of gratitude.
I looked at that sandwich, so cleverly wrapped in plastic that even I could eat it without making a mess, and I thought of how this meal had arrived in my hands. Farmers operating machinery my Civil War ancestors never dreamed of had produced the ingredients. Men and women driving trucks whose cubic footage was greater than the houses of those ancestors had delivered those ingredients to market. Cooks and bakers, using electricity and high-tech gadgets manufactured by other hands, had turned those ingredients into the foot-long I was now enjoying.
All for five dollars and ninety-eight cents plus tax.
That sandwich was a phenomenon.
That grinder made me grateful for the free enterprise system. It made me grateful to be alive in such an age of marvels. It made me grateful to be an American.
Too often we forget how fortunate we are to be born in this time and place.
Many folks in the rest of the world are aware of this good fortune. It’s why they keep busting across our borders.
We take too much for granted. We take for granted that we can buy fresh oranges in the supermarket in January, that we are safe from diseases that killed so many people less than seventy-five years ago, that we can flip a switch and electric light banishes the darkness, that we carry phones in our pockets and can take pictures with them or send a text to Italy, that we spend our adolescence and youth in school instead of working from dawn to dusk on a hard-scrabble farm.
Look at the house or apartment in which you live. Everything in that house from the roll of toilet paper in your bathroom to your microwave is a marvel of sorts. Someone designed those household items, someone manufactured them, and someone delivered them to a place of purchase.
From an historical standpoint, many of these items are mere infants. That microwave in your kitchen only came into general use fifty years ago. That refrigerator preserving your milk and vegetables was unavailable until the 1920s, and those plastic bottles containing sparkling water imported from Italy are even newer than the refrigerator. Hot water heaters in homes were uncommon until after World War I, and most homes lacked showers until after World War II.
With the exception of certain countries like Venezuela and North Korea, the former a socialist dictatorship, the latter a communist dictatorship, free enterprise has brought greater affluence to the rest of the world as well. Rising standards of living around the globe is one of the underreported stories of our time.
This increased material prosperity is the result of the market and free enterprise. These in turn are in connected to the ideas of liberty, natural law, and in the case of the United States, to its Constitution and Bill of Rights.
We have forgotten to count our blessings. We walk through our days oblivious to our good fortune. We live in an age in which all Americans—rich, middle-class, poor—enjoy greater material advantages than a medieval king, yet some of us curse, rail, and shake our fists at the system that produced such abundance.
We live in an age of miracles, but too often lack the eyes to see them.
When we bite into our burgers or grab rectangles of sushi, when we brew our coffee, turn on the heat in our cars, watch our big screen televisions or peruse a British newspaper on our laptops, we might occasionally pause to appreciate for just a moment these and other everyday wonders surrounding us and the men and women who produced them.
In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown speaks to her readers about "gratitude-fueled joy." She directs that phrase toward people and their relationships, but the principle holds true when we are grateful even for the mundane and the small pleasures of our circumstances. The gratitude I felt that day did indeed fire up joy, and that joy in turn changed my attitude and the course of my day.
I've had some great teachers in my time. Who knew one of them would be a sub sandwich from Wal-Mart?
And the epiphany? A sweeping rush of gratitude.
I looked at that sandwich, so cleverly wrapped in plastic that even I could eat it without making a mess, and I thought of how this meal had arrived in my hands. Farmers operating machinery my Civil War ancestors never dreamed of had produced the ingredients. Men and women driving trucks whose cubic footage was greater than the houses of those ancestors had delivered those ingredients to market. Cooks and bakers, using electricity and high-tech gadgets manufactured by other hands, had turned those ingredients into the foot-long I was now enjoying.
All for five dollars and ninety-eight cents plus tax.
That sandwich was a phenomenon.
That grinder made me grateful for the free enterprise system. It made me grateful to be alive in such an age of marvels. It made me grateful to be an American.
Too often we forget how fortunate we are to be born in this time and place.
Many folks in the rest of the world are aware of this good fortune. It’s why they keep busting across our borders.
We take too much for granted. We take for granted that we can buy fresh oranges in the supermarket in January, that we are safe from diseases that killed so many people less than seventy-five years ago, that we can flip a switch and electric light banishes the darkness, that we carry phones in our pockets and can take pictures with them or send a text to Italy, that we spend our adolescence and youth in school instead of working from dawn to dusk on a hard-scrabble farm.
Look at the house or apartment in which you live. Everything in that house from the roll of toilet paper in your bathroom to your microwave is a marvel of sorts. Someone designed those household items, someone manufactured them, and someone delivered them to a place of purchase.
From an historical standpoint, many of these items are mere infants. That microwave in your kitchen only came into general use fifty years ago. That refrigerator preserving your milk and vegetables was unavailable until the 1920s, and those plastic bottles containing sparkling water imported from Italy are even newer than the refrigerator. Hot water heaters in homes were uncommon until after World War I, and most homes lacked showers until after World War II.
With the exception of certain countries like Venezuela and North Korea, the former a socialist dictatorship, the latter a communist dictatorship, free enterprise has brought greater affluence to the rest of the world as well. Rising standards of living around the globe is one of the underreported stories of our time.
This increased material prosperity is the result of the market and free enterprise. These in turn are in connected to the ideas of liberty, natural law, and in the case of the United States, to its Constitution and Bill of Rights.
We have forgotten to count our blessings. We walk through our days oblivious to our good fortune. We live in an age in which all Americans—rich, middle-class, poor—enjoy greater material advantages than a medieval king, yet some of us curse, rail, and shake our fists at the system that produced such abundance.
We live in an age of miracles, but too often lack the eyes to see them.
When we bite into our burgers or grab rectangles of sushi, when we brew our coffee, turn on the heat in our cars, watch our big screen televisions or peruse a British newspaper on our laptops, we might occasionally pause to appreciate for just a moment these and other everyday wonders surrounding us and the men and women who produced them.
In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown speaks to her readers about "gratitude-fueled joy." She directs that phrase toward people and their relationships, but the principle holds true when we are grateful even for the mundane and the small pleasures of our circumstances. The gratitude I felt that day did indeed fire up joy, and that joy in turn changed my attitude and the course of my day.
I've had some great teachers in my time. Who knew one of them would be a sub sandwich from Wal-Mart?