Tonight’s a good night for simple gratitude, so here goes:
- I’m grateful for Michal’s safe drive home for the long weekend. I’m looking forward to doing some things together and otherwise just being in the same space as both my kids. These are good and relatively rare moments. Love ’em.
- For being in a space to hear good teaching. The dharma talk at tonight’s meditation group included insights on three main areas in life: suffering, impermanence, and egolessness. I have been thinking a lot about the nature of suffering. Perhaps once my ponderings begin to make sense to me I’ll actually write some of them down in this blog. In the meantime, I’ll simply say that I am getting a lot of opportunities to learn and think about suffering; and likewise really beginning to understand the concepts of impermanence and egolessness. I imagine these will become even clearer in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
- I am thankful for the fact that Jared has decent health insurance through his job. He needed to get some tests done today that without good insurance would have been out of reach financially. They would have been out of reach for me a few months ago when I was without any health insurance. I was able to purchase a policy that, while not comprehensive by many measures, it will be sufficient to get me through some routine tests and screenings that I need. For 25 plus years I had health insurance coverage through my employer that I probably mostly took for granted. I definitely appreciated it and how much it saved me financially, particularly for many health-related challenges for both kids; but being without insurance for months and the concern/hope that nothing catastrophic happened really brought home to me how very fortunate I was to have had employer-provided health insurance. I hope to have it again sometime soon.
- I am grateful as always for family. While there are the occasional hiccups in relationships that can strain some relationships, by and large I have loving connections with my siblings and in many cases with their offspring. I love being part of a large, diverse family, in spite of the drama that sometimes goes along with that. Life is short (in the scheme of things) and sometimes people who you can count on to stick with you through thick and thin are hard to come by. For some of us who are fortunate, we find those people in our families; for others we find them through friends who are as close or closer to us than family. I am grateful to have both in my life.
This has mostly been a good week. Time continues to fly by. The holiday season is nearly upon us and we are rapidly approaching the end of the year. I was thinking about what I will reflect upon and how I will characterize what 2011 has been like for me. The line that popped into my head comes from an old time gospel song, “my soul looks back and wonders how I got over.” So much has happened this past year that at some level I am amazed to still be standing; but on the other hand, in the scheme of things, while difficult, none of the things that happened this past year were so catastrophic that I was unable to recover. In an odd way, both things are true. Whatever the case, I am grateful to be standing where I am at this moment. I look forward to the journey of the days ahead.
