Walking Down Stairs

Earlier today I walked down the stairs. I've actually got a few different styles of walking down stairs that I employ depending on how I'm feeling at any given moment. Sometimes I run down them, skipping stairs as I go. The inherent danger is readily apparent. A really hip youth marketer could term this style "extreme stair walking" and probably create a whole new subgenre in the useless sports industry. I could see it in the X-Games now; heaps of would-be athletes clad in dorky-looking protective gear raining down staircases of various heights and grades, all the while sponsored by soda companies, wireless providers and hair product manufacturers.

But I'm actually not trying to be funny or sarcastic here, and it seems that within the first paragraph I've already gotten sidetracked. At least in this post, I don't want to poke fun at the desperation of youth marketing or the absurdities of the X-Games, nor do I want to delve into my various styles of stair walking. So let's get back to the point.

Earlier today I walked down the stairs. To the outside observer, it probably didn't look much different than any other time I walked down that same flight of stairs, but something phenomenal occurred on this particular descent.

I was consciously thankful for my ability to do so.

There's a whole lot of amazing science going on in this simple act of walking down the stairs, an everyday act that many of us take for granted or even complain about. The amount of neuro-muscular activity required to get my body from Floor 2 to Floor 1 is simply staggering. And while on other occasions I may not even pay even the slightest gratitude to the full working function of my limbs or my semi-intact kinesthetic sensory abilities, for some reason today I did.

And it made all the temporal things I complain about seem small and trivial; sure I may be "stuck at work" and "fully broke" but some people are unable to find work and others unable to move without a wheelchair.

I wish I could remember more often that gratitude with contentment in the simple things of life is great gain.