Opportunities Abound--A Paragraph a Day

There are many, many problems in this world we live in.  There's violence, hunger, greed, hatred, prejudice, anger, and so many other negative things that we could truly bring ourselves down if we were to think of all the bad all the time.  But that said, we also have to recognize that there are many, many wonderful opportunities, also, especially for those of us who live in countries that tend to be rather wealthy.  My wife and I are going to Germany this week to attend a funeral--something that wouldn't have been at all possible just 100 years ago--or at all affordable even 50 years ago.  We have an opportunity to do something that is very important to us, and we're able to afford it without going broke.  We have opportunities to work, to meet people, to travel, to eat great meals, to have wonderful things in our house like sofas and music and bookcases and books, to go for walks in neighborhoods that are safe, to call family members who live almost two thousand miles away--the list is very long, and it includes so many things that it's hard for us to wrap our minds around just how many opportunities we actually have.  I hope that by the time I leave this planet I'll have taken advantage of as many opportunities as possible, and that I will have squandered as few as possible.  And now that I'm older and (supposedly) wiser, I hope that I'm able to recognize even more of them and take advantage of them.  Perhaps that should be one of our major goals in life--to get good at recognizing legitimate opportunity and making sure that we don't squander it when it shows up.