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About a month ago (5.4.19 to be exact), I broke my ankle after taking a bad fall while bouldering (I consider myself very lucky that my job does not require physical labor). I have about one more month of no weight bearing for the foot, so the iWalk peg-leg and crutches have been my best friends. But during this time I've had my fair share of sitting around and focusing on school, but also simply sitting around because it's really quite a workout to walk down the street. In any case, I've found that living life wih something missing that you know will come back eventually is both awful, but also quite rewarding, almost like a child awaiting birthday presents.

As my friend was saying the other day, if by some miracle you didn't need to sleep, you should tell no one, because you would be expected to use those extra hours for something productive. It's the same argument that if we had three hands, we would want a fourth because we'd expect to get that three hands worth of work done.

By living with something missing, we can get used to living with an extra constraint, and when it eventually gets added back, it's a welcome breath of fresh air. But let us think a little more. What other contraints do we have that we are perhaps unaware of? The first one that comes to mind for me is time: eventually we will all die. Time is a commodity and really ought to be treated as such. Be thankful for the time you have, and make the most of it (now that's an extremely broad statement, and in my opinion is unsatisfactory for many things, but I digress, take it in a positive sense).

Another commodity is attention. This one goes hand in hand with time, but perhaps it is a bit more quantifiable, for every second you live, your attention is on something, so it is really something that can be wasted on garbage (such as memes, forgettable factoids, and whatnot (these things aren't inheritly bad, but they are a form of brain candy and as with normal candy, too much it not good for your health)), or enhanced by thinking critically and working to solve problems plaguing the Earth, or an individual or otherwise.

Yet another can be health. Remember the last time when you had a cold or some illness and couldn't wait to get better to be able to use those clogged nostrils? We certainly love the feeling of breathing right after, but merely hours or even minutes later we no longer appreciate the feeling - we just take it for granted. Now of course we can't appreciate everything all the time, otherwise we'd never get anything done, but maybe once a week or once a month it'd be smart to sit back and reflect on everything you have, everything learned, forgotten, earned, taken, and given.

Perhaps we should look at what all of our constraints and commodities are now and appreciate what we have and what we don't, work to change what we don't like, and appreciate how far we've come and how much we have learned since day zero. Sometimes I think we forget how much time it took to learn to walk, talk and poop properly, not to mention everything else needed to survive and thrive.