Gratitude

Yeah, this site ain't dead yet (and there are some posts likely yet to come as we head into mission drift generally). After the jump: A Thankgiving update!




So: happy Thanksgiving! I have an ocean to be grateful for.

Am I grateful to have visited the Puppetry Center in Atlanta? You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that I am!

Every year at Thanksgiving, my parents have made a habit (I'd say tradition but it doesn't feel that formal) of going around the table and having each person present say one thing they're thankful for. It's one of several reasons the holiday has long been a favorite moment of the year for me - not just to take stock of all the good that we ought to be grateful for, but to do so communally. For years, we attended a Thanksgiving Eve service at our family church, which similarly opened up to the congregation to say what they were thankful for, before eventually giving way to a pie social. Throw in the day-after-Thanksgiving turn to something like a Christmas preview (music, decorating, baking) and you've got a perfect recharging holiday.

One of the memories that most sticks with me on Thanksgiving is from one of those Thanksgiving Eve services. A family friend had recently lost his wife to cancer, and stood to express his thankfulness in the midst of his grief. I can't do justice to his exact words, but something resonated for me - an incohate loss with an incomprehensible commitment to gratitude even before the clouds parted, even before sense could be made. It seemed impossibly difficult. But it also seemed... radiant, somehow.

Years later, I began trying to practice gratitude journaling (almost two years ago), and it's one of the threads (along with therapy, friendship, and travel) that pulled me through the darkest stack o' chapters in my life. In the earliest days of my divorce, the pages are full of grief interwoven with gratitude over the tiniest things - having coffee with a friend, having gone for a run, catching a bus (ok that's not so tiny in Boston). I was, it strikes me looking back now, better at clinging to gratitude in that frightening and destructive chapter than I have been in the most high-flying, "successful" chapters of my life.

In any case: here it's Thanksgiving 2017, a cold and bright morning, and I'm full of hope, love, and excitement, and it's as good a time as any to recommit to the discipline of gratitude. Here, then, a quick, incomplete, and less than intelligible rundown of some of the things that make me most thankful this year.

SPOILER ALERT: This photo contains AT LEAST TWO of the things for which I'm grateful.

1. Patience. I've talked about it in this space before, but somewhere along the line I learned patience, or at least a remedial variant of it. I've had plenty of chapters of frustration this fall as the job hunt and house hunt went along, but I've been grateful to find that more often than not I'm able to trust that all things will fall however they may, and to accept that I only control the tiniest corners of my world. I've still got goals and ambition, but it's been nice to shed the anxiety and fear that shot through things not so long ago.

2. Home. I'm still chipping away at making it mine, but having found a cozy, comfortable place (see above) within walking distance to old friends, with good transit at my fingertips, and getting back to the habit I love of hosting friends, has fed my heart in a very real way. After spending something like 10 months of the last 2 years on the road, it is so very, very good to be nesting and socializing again.

3. Friendships. It's been wonderful to reunite with old friends and start making new back in Chicago; I miss my Boston crew (all the more so after a brief reunion in Atlanta at a theatre conference) but being back in a city with about a 50-50 chance of running into a friend on the street any time I leave the house... that's very good, as is the chance to regularly see some of my oldest and closest. Everything's in flux, and people come and go, but it's been a good year to re-realize that well-nurtured friendships never go that far away.

4. Newness. On the job front, which has been an exciting relief (and a large part of why this space has been quiet for a month); on the meeting-people front; on the discovering-new-corners-of-the-city front. This fall is hitting very nicely my ideal blend of routines and stability with a heaping bowlful of discovery and exploring.

5. Cold weather. This is dumb and trivial by the standards of this list, but holy moly I love layering weather, I love weather where you're keenly aware of how good it is to be somewhere warm, and I love the sense of the world going dormant to lay preparations for what's new. It's my most nostalgic season, and my most hopeful season, all at once.

6. Family. It is insane how wonderful it is to be a short train ride away from my parents, and to have reconnected so profoundly with my siblings over the past few years. I don't know how I got such good fortune to have such people in my life (see also: friends!) but I am enduringly grateful.

I hope you, patient-readers-who-somehow-still-check-on-this-seemingly-abandoned-site, are surrounded too by people you love today, that you are mindful of all the great good in your life, and even when things are at their darkest, I hope you can find those things that give you calm, peace, and joy. It's a discipline like any other, and one of the most valuable ones I know.

Sometimes I'm grateful for the same thing more than once in a morning, how about you let me lead my life already.