Tonight I am amazingly tired and looking ahead to a very long day tomorrow. I have already fallen asleep twice at the computer keyboard and am likely to do so again given how I’m feeling. I am aware of the feeling of fatigue, of having burned my candle at both ends (and the middle, for that matter). I’ve spun the random number wheel several times and while I landed on several good entries, none of them have spoken to me. I have hit a wall and my muse isn’t in the vicinity to bail me out.
Thus, in one of the shorter blogs I’ve written in a long while, I only have the energy to offer a few simple expressions of gratitude.
I am grateful to work with and around good people and grateful that being around them helps me be a better person. Through the conversations I have with them, I recognize some of the gifts and talents that I bring to the world. “To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure the opportunity to do it is the key to happiness,” said the educator John Dewey. I am not entirely sure that I’ve found exactly what I am fitted to do, but in my interactions with the people around me, on the job and outside of work, I have a natural knack of working with people and I enjoy it.
I am grateful as always for my family–both my immediate kin and my extended family, including those cousins and connections I am only now discovering. There’s a bit of a historian and genealogist inside of me, not to mention a very amateur sleuth, on the trail of discovering who “my people” were–from my ex-slave great, great grandparents and their children and the succeeding generations down to me and my children, family and ancestry is fascinating to me. I am grateful for the technology that is giving me access to records and documents that are helping me unlock some of the questions that will allow me to tell stories of family who are no longer alive to speak for themselves. It continues to fire my imagination and rekindle my desire to write about them. We shall see where that leads.
Finally, I am grateful for the ability to find joy in small things. Tonight as I sat here half-dozing and half writing, I could hear the evening song of a robin singing in her clear and unmistakable call. The familiarity of these sounds is comforting in the evening as I am winding down the day as well as in the early morning as I am starting my day with my morning journal. These are simple things that bring a measure of beauty and joy into my life. I am grateful for the full range of physical senses and abilities that allow me to enjoy the beauty around me; I try never to take for granted being able bodied.
I am now off to take my rest and get ready for the day tomorrow. I am grateful to have a reason each day to be here writing about gratitude and the many blessings around me. You are largely why I write: I am grateful for you.
