Grant St. (I miss and love you M@ry)

People have been telling me for my whole life that everyone is born with a talent, or a gift if you will. So once you hear a phrase like that you start searching for your gift. You develop a sense of hope. You learn to dream of a better you. You try out this and that and you eventually come across something that you are actually good at. If you are lucky, you might even find that you enjoy your talent. On the other hand, maybe you are one of the unfortunate people who just never could find that one special talent. Maybe you searched and searched and never quite did find that thing that you do best. So then you begin to question whether or not that alleged gift even exists. You begin to wonder if the idea of being born with a gift was just some fairy tale story designed to motivate you to do something with your life. The truth of the mater is that the only gift any of us receive is life itself. However, I sometimes wonder if even life should be called a gift. Perhaps we could do life more justice by calling it a responsibility. What if there is more to this gift story than we know? What if there is a system in place which guides us to improve and evolve so that we can better serve the greater existence. Perhaps our search for our gift has made us blind to our duty to develop a skill. I've heard people using the phrase "nothing in life is free". In order to have anything real in this world you have to work for it. In a world of materials it is sometimes hard to see the truly meaningful things in life. There is greater joy found in a personal relationship than could ever be found in any material possession. There is greater joy found within love for oneself then could ever be offered from an external source. But the greatest joy of all is the love of all existence. The feeling of being connected to something greater than yourself. Call it what you will. God, or Buddha, or evolution. They are all just separate names which describe the same thing. There is a force which creates us and pushes us to grow and achieve. We have an obligation to this force. We are obligated to improve our piece of existence. To continuously strive toward our full potential. In this way our talents become our gifts. With the skills we develop we can create a better world for ourselves. To me, the greatest sin of them all is to waste what abilities we have, or to abuse our gift by neglecting the rest of the world and using them only for personal gain. Life has come a long way since yesterday, and the only way to keep moving in the right direction is to be true to yourself. . . . I edited my profile with Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4