Say, "I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye."

Is there anything more flattering than when someone tells you they were reading something and thought of you? Well, unless they were reading something vile. Anyhow.

Today a coworker brought me his book, "Peace Is Every Step" by Thich Nhat Hanh because the excerpt, "Flower Insights," made him think of me.

It was a tremendous thing to read on a day like today, where it has been raining all morning, everything gray, and my head is foggy with an impending cold. It got me thinking of mindfulness most especially, and what a difficult word that is to even wrap your head around. To be aware of the moment in its simplest form -- not just where you are and what you are doing, but to be aware of yourself, in your body. Aware of your own physical presence and the space it takes up in the universe. And to be acutely aware of that scale - the universe: grand, immense; you: tiny, small.

Here are two things that remind me of being mindful, that implore me to stop stepping outside of myself to worry and fret or plan and execute, that tell me: just be.

From "Flower Insights": That is the problem of life. If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are not really there thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other problems then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvelous reality. Then you can smile and embrace him in your arms. Read the whole thing here.

And the Kimya Dawson song, "I Like Giants."