Tonight I am grateful for having had another good day. Nothing extraordinary happened: I had my usual spate of meetings and other activities, including kind of the ordinary aggravations. It has been a completely regular day. For the second day in a row I found myself in really awful traffic on my commute home, but unlike yesterday I didn’t battle staying awake for the duration of the trip. I listened to my audiobook–periodically talking back to the characters as they were about to do something ill-advised–and made it to the grocery store after a long but incident-free drive. These are simple things, but I do not take them for granted. There have been times when the snarled traffic would have raised my blood pressure a notch or two, and while I am still likely to have those days in front of me, today was not one of those. In the scheme of things, that’s good.
Gratitude has been my constant companion over these 800-plus days. As I am approaching day 900 and the ending of this public, daily gratitude practice, I am contemplating how I want to mark these last days. Part of me wants to declare that for the last 31 days (essentially the month of December) I will only write original posts (rather than spin the RNG wheel and pull from a randomly-selected previous post.) The realistic part of me that gets home exhausted many days, who has of late been frequently abandoned by any of her Muses, realizes that this might be a crazy challenge. And yet, part of me wants to mark these last days in some meaningful way. I have a little over a week to come up with something creative…or not. I would ask my legion of adoring readers to send me suggestions, only the once larger number of daily readers is now a mere handful, small but faithful. I’m not sure I would get many suggestions from my fans. The likeliest solution is that I will consult with the Creative Source that resides in and around me and hope I can draw inspiration to sustain me over these remaining 40 days. At one level, it doesn’t matter: what is important is that I continue to express gratitude each day for the many blessings, from the sublime to the mundane, that touch my life moment-by-moment, day-by-day.
Tonight, I offer the simple gratitude for having worked hard today, offering thoughts, ideas, and wisdom, raising questions, addressing issues, connecting with staff. Laughing, enjoying human contact before climbing into my car, which carried me securely from point A to point B. Gratitude for the energy and alertness that allowed me to safely maneuver my way around, past, and behind hundreds of motorized vehicles of all sizes plodding down the highway. These are simple things. For the phone call with my son and later with my sister, the text messages from my daughter and ex-husband/friend that connected me to family. Grateful for the funds that allowed me to purchase a few necessities at the grocery store for dinner this evening and tomorrow and for spending a few moments with my four-legged roommate. These are simple things, and I am grateful for them each and all.
Tomorrow is another day, full of possibilities, as is the rest of today. Each moment is ripe with possibility. I hope I continue to recognize the beauty and aliveness that is present in and around me all the time. As I sit here writing this, hundreds of millions of people are expressing gratitude for the blessings in their lives. Just now, right at the same time as I am. How do I know this? I just do. How can they not be? I am reasonably convinced that I am not alone in recognizing and expressing gratitude for the abundance in my life, for the beauty that surrounds me. I know I am unique, but in that way I am in the company of many, many people, many beings with whom I am connected in this larger web of life. Giving thanks is wired in our DNA; it’s simply what we do, we can’t not do it. I know, it sound kind of “pie in the sky,” doesn’t it? And yet, I completely believe it to be true. Tonight I will go to sleep grateful and tomorrow I will likewise wake up grateful I will also wake up with sleep in my eyes, disoriented and tired, not ready to get up and face the world, anxious about my presentation, and all those things I am most days when I wake up. And, I will be grateful. And that is a beautiful thing.
