Living Inside a Miracle
Phil Gosling
Our lives are filled with routines. Indeed your whole life can be just one huge routine in which every day starts at the usual time, you go to work in the' usual way, have the usual time off, do the usual things in the evening and weekends, and go on the usual vacations. You drive the usual type of car, live in the usual kind of house and earn the usual income that has been pre-ordained by your usual position in life.
Routines are essential, medically sound - and often unfortunate.
Routines are essential because without them we'd have to spend most of the day thinking about the next thing we have to do and tie knots in a thousand handkerchiefs to remind us of what to do next. Without routines we'd all go crazy.
Routines are a way of maintaining the status quo. Not the rock group but the state in which everything attempts to stay the same. Indeed medicine has a name for it: homeostasis. Homeostasis is what every cell in your body is trying to achieve. It is the state of equilibrium, that point where everything stays the same; where nothing changes. This is part of your natural programming. Your cells are programmed into thinking, "I am alive, therefore if things don't change, I will stay that way." Cool thinking really, for a cell.
And because you and I are the sum total of a zillion cells working in harmony then we too, as people, also suffer from corporal homeostasis. With few exceptions most of the human race avoid change, like things to stay as they are; if it ain't broke don't fix it; and when change comes along we don't like it at all: unless it's good change of course. That's OK.
But routines can still be unfortunate. By definition we don't notice them or think about them. So when your lady or man clears off with someone else it's possibly because you took her or him for granted and never noticed. Routines keep you where you 'are, in the same place. But most of all, the big problem with routines is that they stop us noticing something very important. We are blinded by them. They stop us noticing the world we are living in. We take the seasons, the sun rising, green grass, trees, the air we breathe, even life, for granted.
Above all it stops us seeing that we are living inside a miracle; that we are miracles within a miracle. We shouldn't even be here; life is against the laws of physics. And those very few people who see this, and study it, discover a strange truth. Not only are we miracles inside a miracle, but we can change things. We have the power. Not only are we in The Matrix, but like Keanu Reeves' Neo, we can control it. You ARE Neo.
