How's your day going? How grateful do you feel for being alive? Look around you - have a good look at where you are - there's beauty before your very eyes - surely that's something to be grateful for. If you're with someone - regardless of how well you think you know them (because that's all we ever really do) - have a good look and listen - as if it were a new experience. All the people who populate our lives have their lives too - their trying to come to terms with their normal crazy minds, just like you and me... be grateful for having the opportunity to rub shoulders with them too. Most of all, take a deep breath or two - and be grateful for the joy of being alive. And, if you don't think it's a joy, consider the alternative!

We all have the potential to be very sad people and most of us succeed in living down to that expectation. The normal mind - yeah, the normal crazy one - is designed to enable us make it through the day - keep your head down, avoid danger, run if necessary, don't get beyond your comfort zone and, whatever you do, don't stray from the herd. And this is what we call living!

Today's video is all about being grateful - not in the way that sad normal people talk about being grateful for small mercies but about being truly full of the joys of life. Now, if you are dragging yourself through your day on autopilot, finding relative comfort in the herd, it's pretty damn difficult to be joyful.

I recall a scene from the Jack Nicholson movie About Schmidt - a recently retired actuary (I'm sure there's some smart remark I could make there - and I'd be entitled to being an accountant! - but I'll hold off) who comes home from shopping to find his wife dead on the kitchen floor. He wonders about what's lying on the floor and how every little thing that she did - little things that used to be endearing - drove him round the bend... how she snored at night, how she minced around the house doing the cleaning - in their later years together, he hated every single thing about her... until she was gone!

Your life is passing you by as you read this. If you choose to have your head firmly stuck up your backside wondering why your life is full of crap that's your own stupidity... it may be the way you're wired but modern science we can play around with our neural wiring to come up with a configuration that enables us live the moment, savour the moment, immerse ourselves in the moment - and by, quite literally, full of the joys of life.