I'm not religious but in my own way I'm reminded from time to time to be thankful for what I have.<br /><br />I get irritated by all the usual stuff like bad drivers and stupid politicians and extreme views at either end of the spectrum and power cuts not being fixed in five minutes and long checkout queues and gansta rap music and so on and so on.<br /><br />But none of this really matters when I compare what I have with what a lot of others don't have.<br /><br />Sometimes when I turn on a tap I think how lucky I am that clean, disease free water comes out of the wall at the flick of a wrist. Not like a lot of the world's people whose first task of the day is to spend an hour or more walking with a jar on their heads to bring back a muddy sludge full of disease that is their water ration for the day.<br /><br />A couple of days ago I saw the girl in my daughter's Grade 6 who can't sit on the floor with the other kids in assembly because she has a wheeled walking frame that she gets about in awkwardly in leg splints. She sits up the back with all the parents in a chair because that's what she needs to get back into her frame. This girl and her parents are so happy with the school because it let her compete in running races, which she has no chance of winning but for the past few years she's joyously propelled her frame along the course, to thunderous cheers from everybody. The last school wouldn't let her run because of legal liability fears.<br /><br />When I'm in a supermarket thinking that it's terrible that lamb is $35 a kilo and we'll have to stick with steak or chicken at half the price, sometimes it strikes me that I should be grateful that I can afford any meat and that I'm surrounded by a vast range of the best quality food in the world at affordable prices which a lot of people in the world can only dream about.<br /><br />Sometimes when I'm in the country at night and the sky is clear and bright like it never is in cities, I look around and think how lucky I am that I can play with my boat and eat as much as I want and criticise our politicians and do pretty much anything I want. Yet under the same stars there are people who have none of that. Lots of them are starving or at least badly short of food by my standards. Lots of them have no health care for even the most serious ailments when I can go to the doctor and get pills and a certificate for a day off work for a bad cold. A few of them will be rounded up and lined up on ditches they've been forced to dig before they get a bullet in the back of the head purely because they were fighting against injustice and corruption like I've never known or can begin to understand.<br /><br />Maybe if I thought along these lines a lot more often I'd realise just how stupid it is to get wound up about most of the stuff that most of us spend most of our time carrying on about.
