Can you taste water?

Have you ever thanked God for the taste of water? Have you ever taken a sip, and paused with a smile on your face, just to admire and appreciate how refreshing simple water can be? A week back, I got run down with the seasonal flu and fever, something so basic in the list of illnesses, yet incredibly paralyzing, especially if you’re a mother to two hyper toddlers (the sick mom is an entirely different phenomenon, much under-appreciated and unacknowledged). In that week, I also got severely dehydrated, and could barely manage to walk without feeling dizzy. My husband being a doctor himself, was after me to drink as much water as I possibly could, but the tiniest sip would leave me disgusted for minutes. I couldn’t taste water. Yes yes, I know, water is supposed to be colorless, odorless, tasteless, but no, there IS a specific taste to water we have unfortunately refused to acknowledge for far too long. I couldn’t taste it, and I couldn’t drink it. I used to drink a sip every day, to see if I could taste water again, took me an entire week, and when I could… that’s the day, I paused, smiled and thanked God for this underestimated blessing.

It takes a week-long of a draining illness, to make a normal human being like myself, realize the beauty that is in something as incredibly mundane as water. In that moment, I realized, we human beings are such pathetic ingrates. We are so exceptionally ungrateful for the monumental amount of blessings surrounding our every breath and waking moment; we are so lost in the past or the future, and fail to recognize the abundance before us in the present, that we don’t thank God for breathing fresh air, till we have had a moment when we couldn’t, we don’t thank God for opening our eyes every day, till we have had a moment we couldn’t, we don’t even thank God for being able to take every single step, till a moment we are overcome with a debilitating disease that didn’t allow us to do these rudimentary steps of existence. We are ingrates to not recognize the countless reasons we have to be filled with gratitude, because we are too consumed in the reasons to be unhappy and miserable, and in that cloud of negativity, we only move towards more reasons to deny the bounties of God.

Do me a favor, rather, do yourself a favor. Pause. Take a deep breath of fresh air, and smile, and thank God. Pause. Close your eyes, and open them, absorb the nuances of colors surrounding you, and thank God. Pause. Take a sip of plain water, and enjoy it, taste it, and thank God, that you can do all this in this present moment, because many people just might not be able to.

  • Hanna Seyal