The “Tipper” Miracles: Part Two: The Average Tipper

Continuing the topic from the last blog, we will now move on to what I call the average tippers. Most of the people reading this are most likely in this category. Even though they tend to be the least memorable of the three, these were the people that provided most of my money. These people allowed me to support myself. Humans always seem to search for things that are out of the ordinary. Maybe this is why we barely take notice of the things or people that seem common place. It’s very unfortunate, to be honest, because this applies to the “everyday” miracles as well. We all have our routines. We all have places to go, people to deal with, and things to take care of. So much passes us by without us even noticing, including everyday miracles.

Before I can get into what we are missing, I think we each need to decide what we personally feel the definition of a miracle is. When I was taking college courses, I had an art teacher that assigned us a paper. In order to get the information for this paper, we had to go out on campus and interview several random people that we didn’t know with one single question... “What is art?” He assigned this to show us that much like beauty, art is in the eye of the beholder.
There were some people who believed like me; art was everywhere and in everything. A building, a car, and even a fork...these all began from the creativity of someone. Many believed nature itself to be art as well. The artist differed from person to person depending on their beliefs, but nonetheless, it was all a beautiful canvas to them.
There were some who were more limited in their responses; paintings, music, some things that were designed, but nothing nature. That isn’t art...that just is.
There were other people who were extremely limited (and quite honestly I felt a little bad for). They felt that art was strictly limited to sculpture, paintings, and so forth. Nothing outside of the “idealistic” art world could possibly qualify as art.

In this paper I learned of the ways people see things. It’s not a matter of what is correct or incorrect, it was about personal perception. Different people interpret different things in different ways. I have stood before a painting with another person, and after studying it, we both explained what we felt the artist was trying to portray. More often than not, the interpretations were different. Even with the blogs that you all read and comment on; I will read and hear how you interpret them and what they said to you and sometimes it is very different from what I had in mind. Interesting isn’t it? It doesn’t mean that one of us looked at the painting incorrectly or that any of you are reading the blogs wrong; it means that these things speak to you in very different ways. And the same goes for miracles. So I will ask you to pause for a moment and consider this question, what do you define as a miracle? There is no right or wrong answer in this. My personal definition is that just about anything can be a miracle. Most people see miracles as these huge incredible things where people are allowed to defy death or a message or face appears on a sacred place or something. (The “In Your Face” miracles. But we will get into that in part three.) But what about when you are driving to work and you just happen to have timed it right so that you were able to hit your breaks when someone turned in front of you. What about when you were having a bad day and some random person went by and said hello and smiled at you, actually making you feel a tiny bit lighter? What about those “good days” as we call them, when everything seems to line right up for us? What about when you have to go buy something and you were pleasantly surprised at the register to find out someone forgot to post a price and it’s much cheaper than you thought?

I know that there could very well be readers sitting there saying, “No...those are coincidence. Not miracles.” But, in my opinion, coincidences and miracles go hand in hand. Using art for an example again, you will sometimes see sculptures that look like a pile of scrap metal or a tower of sponges in a museum. The most common response I hear from people looking at art like that is “You call this art? I can do that!” There was a piece that I was studying that would cause this reaction from a lot of people. To the unknowing eye, it was a collection of weird random things that had nothing to do with anything. But when you started to read the title and hear the story behind it, you discover that the artist was using symbolism to capture his thoughts and feelings on September 11th . You suddenly see things that represented planes, the twin towers, heroes, hate, and the US...the list goes on and on. It was actually very beautifully done and very moving.

I believe G-d reveals Himself to us in countless ways. Sometimes it’s an incredible miracle that people will talk and write about for years. Sometimes it’s something small and simple that is almost like a whisper saying, “I am here.” When you wake in the morning, try and look around you and see the simple common things. These things that are everyday miracles that a lot of the time go unnoticed or are easily forgotten. When you really begin to see them, if you are anything, like me, you will just smile and know that G-d just lovingly whispered in your ear, “I am here.”

I am going to include a song with this blog. A very good one that talks about the little things in life. And also over coming when they go wrong. The artist is Rob Thomas and the song is called Little Wonders. I was reading one day and he said he had been struggling to come up with the lyrics for this song and then one day he was walking his dog and as he was absent mindedly wanderin, he felt a tug on the leash and turned and saw his dog standing with his head up and his eyes closed, enjoying the feeling of the breeze. That's when it hit him, it's the little things in life and that when he came up with Little Wonders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsT2URr1Igc

G-d Bless.

K

To be continued...The “Tipper” Miracles: Part Three: The Incredible Tippers.