I've just finished doing an extremely repetitive job... resizing website images for a new website I'm just about to launch... forty minutes work which I could have ambled through or, as I chose, forty minutes in which I pitted myself against myself: trying to do each batch quicker, more efficiently, than the previous patch. It was a little competition against the clock: no more than a mind game but, I thought, if my mind normally plays games with me, surely I'm entitled to turn the tables. There are all kinds of mind-numbingly routine things that you will do today. Choose to do them as if you were competing for an Olympic Medal... learn how to engross yourself in the moment - it is the essence of flow.

If you're that way inclined, it must be highly entertaining to run a restaurant! We had a beautiful lunch yesterday in Annecy, known (with good reason) as the Venice of the Alps. The food was lovely but the floor-show was superb. People getting annoyed because the restaurant couldn't serve a meal that wasn't on the menu, poeple getting stressed because they weren't being served at high speed... holiday-makers who should have known better.

Best of all was a family - husband, wife (with a small child in her arms) and mother-in-law. They hadn't reserved a table and got annoyed when they couldn't sit at one that was already reserved. The wife suggested that they could sit at another table, without noticing that it too had a reserved sign on it. "Are you blind or stupid?" the husband bellowed. The waitress suggested that she set up a table specially for them but its location didn't suit the husband: "I'm not paying you money to sit where I don't want to sit!"... he was only short of stamping his foot in temper!

Whilst the wife and her mother discussed where they might sit with the waitress, the said gentleman stormed up the street in a huff... eventually the ladies had no choice but to leave and follow him! You simply couldn't get entertainers like that if you paid them!

A couple of nights ago, as I was getting ready for bed, I took a few minutes to watch a huge moon settle across the ridge of mountains to the northwest and, as I gazed, a shooting star fizzed across the sky in a big, slow arch, just above the moon... it was ludicrously false looking, like a bad Hollywood special effect and it was the first time I'd ever seen one.

For no apparent reason, I than went looking for Deepak Chopra's wonderful book, Synchrodestiny - great book, dreadful title and, as I opened up the introduction, I read the following words:

"Miracles happen every day... they are the shooting stars of everyday life. When we see shooting stars, their rarity makes them seem magical, but in fact, they streak across teh sky all of the time."

Synchronicity or what?! The point is that, as Chopra says, miracles are an everyday occurance - but we're never present enough to see them, to take advantage of them or, indeed, to create our own. We create our own miracles by being present, in the moment, to the reality of the moment, mindful of the miracles that we dearly want to create: our goals and objectives, small, medium and grand.

The steps involved for getting what you want out of life are simple: you need to decide what miracles you would most like to happen for you and you then need to turn up - fully turn up - to the here and now. You need to immerse yourself in the here and now and you need to train your mind, through meditation, for that explicit purpose. After that, you can simply watch all heaven breaking loose around you!

PS - If you don't like the word "miracle", that's your problem!