I am 5’6″ tall. Well, actually, I’m 5’6 and 1/2″ tall. I always used to be sure and include that extra 1/2″. I felt like I had to take all I could get, as I am the shortest person in my family. The youngest, too.
Yes. My family is fairly tall. My dad was, and my brothers are all 6’2″. One of my sisters is 6’3″. The rest of my sisters are between 5’8″ and 5’10”. Or, at one time, they were.
Oddly enough, I was the biggest baby at birth, rolling in at 9 pounds 10 ounces.
Enough about me, gabby-blog-writer. Most of us reading this today, thankfully, fall into the normal ranges when it comes to our bodies. We are around average heights and weights. We have ten fingers, ten toes. Two eyes that work. Things are as plain as the nose on our faces, thank goodness.
No tails. No webbed anything. No third tits.
Yes. We are “normal.”
Here’s the thing. I’ve never been a glamour girl with a bikini body.
But I tell you what. I give thanks for my beautiful body every single day, because it works.
I can pee. Stand on my own. Eat. Walk. Think and talk. Breathe on my own.
Yes, my body is truly miraculous, and I am so grateful for that.
Most of us have been gifted in this same way. It truly is a thing to be thankful for. Our miraculous bodies.
Here are some things it does. Without us having to tell it to.
Our eyes blink around 20 times a minute. That’s over ten million times a year.
Our tongues are covered in about 8,000 taste buds, each containing up to 100 cells. These help us taste our food.
Right along those lines. We produce about 40,000 liters of spit in our lifetimes. Or to put it another way. One person’s spit is enough to fill around five hundred bathtubs.
Here’s another good thing we do. That plain nose on our faces will produce about a cupful of nasal mucus every day. We need all these things.
We have 2.5 million sweat pores.
I mentioned the peeing thing before. What a gift. Spread across their lifetime, most people spend an average of one whole year sitting on the toilet. And while we are there, we pee enough every month to fill a bathtub. That’s about a half gallon each day.
And then there is the good muscle. The blood pumper. Our hearts beat about 100,000 times a day.
I am so glad to be average in this way.
Some people are not. Some people have it hard.
Others have it odd.
Like, Robert Wadlow. He is the tallest person in history, at 9 feet tall. Health issues plagued him from the start and he lived only 22 years, from 1918 to 1940.
Then there was the shortest person. Chandra Bahadur Dangi. He was a Nepali man who lived from 1939 to 2015. He was only one foot and nine inches tall.
Or. There is Devendra Suthar, from India. He was born with a condition called polydactylism which means he was born with more fingers or toes than the average person. He has 28 digits, more than anyone else in the world. Born in 1973.
So. Yes. Some people have it quite odd, at least in comparison to societal and biological norms.
Being “normal” is a gift.
Actually, it is quite extraordinary. It is filled with abundance.
It think abundance is when we can see that there are endless possibilities before us. And at the same time, we see (and appreciate) an incredibly rich existence right where we are.
It is a feeling of gratitude for everything and everyone in our lives.
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“Even the smallest shift in perspective can bring about the greatest healing.”
― Joshua Kai
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“Gratitude builds a bridge to abundance.”
― Roy Bennett
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“Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”
— Epicurus
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All around us. The greatness of normal.
