I was dreaming. In the dream there were a group of kids lost in play, and nearby a young boy was sleeping. His mom gently woke him up. The boy, as it turned out in the dream, had Aspergers. I don’t know why that was relevant? He lay there, newly awake, saying a few incoherent things, and then he said, “This is my life.”

Suddenly my entire dream was about this statement. In my dream, I actually planned out writing this down. A young boy wakes up and is disoriented, then he comes to a realization that ‘oh, I have woken up, and this is my life’. How seldom are we ‘awake’ enough to truly understand this profound statement?

Recently I listened to the audio book ‘In Love With The World – A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardot of Living and Dying‘ by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. In it he spoke of the idea that we die every night and are reborn each morning. We completely lose our consciousness, our identity of who we are, when we fall asleep. And we wake up anew. With waking comes the realization of who we are, and our consciousness returns to us, ‘this is my life’.

Do we take the time to truly appreciate the wonder of waking each day? Of being reborn to who we are and who we can be? Each day is a new day, each breath a first breath, each moment a moment to be fully present… Like kids, fully immersed in play.

This is my life. This is your life. How will we choose to live it ‘now’?

Wake up.