Glory In The Highest
Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don't fully understand, you're still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you've been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that's just right for your body's needs, as it was before you fell asleep.
You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect.
The interesting gift of these vivid hues is furthermore made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.
Your hands work wonderfully well. Your heart circulates your blood all the way out to replenish the energy of the muscles and nerves in your fingers and palms and wrists. And after your blood has delivered its blessings, it finds its way back to your heart to be refreshed. This wondrous mystery recurs over and over again without stopping every minute of your life.
You can smell intoxicating aromas. You can hear provocative and soothing sounds. You can taste a thousand different tastes. How is any of this possible? You can think thoughts any time you want -- big, wide, colorful thoughts or tiny dark burrowing thoughts. You can revel and wallow in great oceans of emotion. What colossal secret intelligence or improbable series of fabulous accidents conspired to bestow these superpowers upon you?
Language is another stupendous marvel. Millions of souls have cooperated intricately for untold centuries to cultivate a system of communication that you understand very well. Your ability to speak and read and write makes you feel strong and dynamic. It connects you with the world. It allows you to indulge in one of your greatest pleasures, which is to hear and tell stories.
Maybe this is the best gift of all: You have a staggeringly potent creative tool: your imagination. You use it to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is the engine of your destiny, the catalyst with which you design your future.
Or maybe this is the best gift of all: You know that you are you. You are exultantly and extravagantly aware that you are alive and conscious and awake and unique. You have a million different feelings and fantasies about what it means to be you.
Do you remember when you were born? It was a difficult miracle that involved many people who worked very hard on your behalf. No less amazing is the fact that you have continued to grow ever since then, with new cells being born within you all the time to replace the old cells that are dying.
At this very moment, there are 50 trillion cells in your body, and each of them is really a sentient being in its own right. They all act together as a community, blessing you with their astonishing collaboration. It's just like magic.
Everywhere you look: glory
Every step you take: glory
Every breath you take: glory glory
Soaring roaring uproarious glory
is our story
This succulent burst of glory has been brought to you by the imaginary lightning bolts you can shoot out the ends of your fingers any time you want to.
"Glory in the Highest" uses material from a much longer piece called "Glory in the Highest" in the book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia. The longer piece can be found online in three parts: