Thanks for Everything

Gratitude is good medicine and it's an excellent practice. There is wisdom in the way autumnal and winter holidays fall. We are in the suicide season of dark shortening days and long cold nights. Hunger (of all sorts), loneliness, melancholic nostalgia all thrive at this time of the year. Past traumas, disappointments and deaths are highlighted, especially if they occurred during this suicidal season.


To reflect then, on gratitude, on what we have, what we may have been given and what we take for granted, is a noble distraction. We all criticize the business aspects and commercialism of this season. However, in a small degree the activity is therapeutic. I'm not talking about standing in line for four hours for some useless electronic gadget that will prove to you peers, for one fleeting second that you are a success.


I'm talking about lesser things. I am cleaning my oven today. Usually I just move to a new house when an oven gets dirty. I'm grateful that I love where I live enough to clean my oven. I have a beautiful dead bird in my refrigerator and I want to roast her in a clean oven. Tomorrow I will rise early, peel, chop, stuff and enjoy the smell of the roasting turkey. I will be surrounded by people I love, that's enough to be grateful for forever, the people who walk through all the seasons of our lives.


The activity of the holidays only provide respite for a day or so. And I have many things to be grateful for every moment of my life. I have learned through the process of suffering and a fledgling understanding of spirituality (based in part on suffering), to be grateful for it all.


I am grateful for the miracle of my body. Micro-miracles like a bone in my hand or a joint in my thumb. Extraordinary engineering. I am grateful for the nasty disease which I have been diagnosed with, Rheumatoid Arthritis, which is slowly destroying the joints in my hands. RA brought my attention to these miraculous tools.


I am grateful for the tiniest little flower I saw this morning on a bush. It's stunning effort to reproduce in the face of brutal cold and approaching winter.


I am grateful for all of my illnesses, traumas and losses. They made me so miserable that I had to look inside for joy. The joy that enables me to feel wonder and delight in the simplest external occasions of beauty and goodness, things that I used to hurry past in my quest for more and better.


Happiness and goodness can not exist without despair and loss. I am grateful for that dynamic and so many other things that I will never understand. I am thankful for my ignorance as it helps me to achieve a level of humility and detachment . I do not recommend deliberate ignorance or assuming a lack of interest. I refer to the acknowledgment that there are so many things I can never understand. I must learn to let go and move on.


I hope that I can live in a posture of gratitude for everything. I know that it's impossible to accomplish this but I hope I keep returning to the effort. For me this has been an essential piece of the life puzzle. This is the piece that leads me to happiness and genuine gratitude. So as we Americans celebrate with too much food, too much football and wonderful, general merriment, I say thanks. Thanks for everything.