The Layman Philosopher

As I exited the rain forest warm environment of my car, the cold shocked my entire being into a new reality creating a brain freeze as intense as any coming by way of a quickly eaten ice cream cone. I turned to begin an iceman slide-walk to the my destination, dressed in my multi-layered coat and Mt. Everest quality gloves, a young man in a simple summer-weight sweatshirt and holey blue jeans approached. In amazement, I called out “Nice weather, huh” and fully expected him to reply with a quivering shivering voice that his heated car was just a few steps away. Instead, he replied with a simple statement, “If you don’t have occasional pain, how do you know you are alive”. And so, I spent different parts of my day thinking about that statement from the layman philosopher. I had heard his lifetime lesson in various forms many time before, but just as one can walk the same path every day and still, from time to time, see something new that always was there, my attention had been drawn to a fact that always was there – it is sometimes that pain that lets us appreciate pleasure, the sadness that lets us appreciate happiness, the loss that lets us appreciate all we have.