Open Me First

I don't know about you, but I usually open the biggest presents under the Christmas tree first though some of the sounds issuing from certain smaller boxes when shaken are often much too intriguing to ignore. This year, however, I am determined to open the most important gift first.

This important gift certainly will not be clothing. Having insulted more than a few hapless relatives while growing up with my lukewarm responses to sweaters or shirts, most of them are trained by now to send me books, food, trivial adult toys or such late night infomercial stuff as survival knives, or Ab busters of one sort or another. However, I draw the line at those Japanese steak knives.

That important gift is opening up myself to new ideas and people and possibilities. I am going to open me first this Christmas morning.

My observation at personal mid-century is that being open to life, especially in the sense of having an open mind and heart is, in my opinion, one of the most precious of the Creator's gifts to human beings.

You receive this gift simply by being born, and you revel in this gift as a small child and become quite irritated and impatient with adults when they try to stifle your impulses to explore new situations and try on new ways of thinking or creating, and especially when playing the music of your own generation-usually quite loud of course

Like its surprisingly close cousin, gratitude, a little of this gift goes a long way. It only took a moment of openness, for example, to bring you to Suite101. You ran across the Suite while looking for someting on a search engine or a friend mentioned it as a cool place on the Net. Whatever, just that tiny bit openness led you to what I consider one of the finest resources on the Net. That openness may have led you to becoming an editor or you may have made new friends or used some knowledge gained from articles to make a plant grow better or help a relationship mature. But it all began with an open mind and heart.

Sometime in your life you will fall in love. You will probably be the most open and vulnerable that you will ever be when that happens. That's because you are more easily hurt when you are open, and you are never more open than with your lover. Yet, life resides in this vulnerability. It's what makes the real flowers so different in the end from the plastic flowers that almost look real. That delicacy, that openness, that vulnerability is the essence of this thing that we call life in my view.

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