"...the habits of survival"

Here's something from a piece of paper that fell down back behind my refrigerator. If I'm not mistaken, it was written by Sy Safransky, the man behind (and who is) the greatness of The Sun magazine. But I could be wrong about him being the author...feel free to set me straight if you find out otherwise. Anyway...lord knows how old it is, but I dig it still...

Those who returned from the dead, even though they had reason to believe that they would now live forever, did not have time for others' expectations. Some tried to explain to us the overwhelming brilliance of it all...what it is like to awaken to the sights and sounds and smells of the world as a fully conscious person. Those who have never lost the world don't notice the weight of air, the tug of gravity, the smell of our own skin. We are distracted by things to clean, things to buy. We occupy our minds with the lives of others or spend much of our time wanting and dreaming. Or else we are consumed by the unrelenting desire to simply stay alive, to survive the world unscathed, and we filter out everything that is not relevant to that goal. Even in the most serene situations - napping on a flat, warm boulder after a long hike, or lying naked next to someone when there is nothing calling you away - even in those situations when we forget that there are such things as threats, the habits of survival keep us from seeing all there is around us...keep us from feeling it all as intensely as we could.

From that mouth to god's ear...