Over the past handful of years some experiences and some people and some stories have together helped me form two ideas: I want to relish and savor every day, breath, and smile I get to have in this life, and I want to never, never ever wish away life (i.e. “I wish I was some-amount-of-time in the future instead of here in this now”). Really, they are just different facets of the same idea: appreciating life.

Terribly original thought, right? Well..er…yeah. Moving on..

Life philosophies don’t come much more straight forward than that one, but I quickly found some trickiness in putting it into practice. So then I have spent the past such and so many years trying my hardest to really do it, to really, really really appreciate life. I think I’ve had moderately good success. And along the way, I’ve come across different ways, lenses really, through which I could look at this idea, appreciating life.  Zoom forward to the other day: my wonderful girlfriend sends me a link to a video. And lemme tell you, this video, wow. Holy shit. First: the cinematography is stunning. Second: there’s a clip of a de Havilland Beaver on skis taking off from a glacier. Third: there is an idea. A really good idea about how to think about appreciating life.

Let’s suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. And you would naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of  total pleasure each, you would say, “Woah, that was pretty great! …but, now, let’s have a surprise.”

“Let’s have a dream, which isn’t under control—where something is going to happen to me, and I don’t know what it’s going to be.” And, ah, you would dig that and come out of that and say, “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”

 Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further-out gambles, as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now.