Giving Thanks

 

This is exactly what I needed. I stumbled on this on the Internet as I tried to divert my mind from dwelling on sad things and be proactive. It's not that I want to be sad. It's just that sometimes it seems to be my default setting. I know that I have much to be thankful for. Yet I get lost in the past or the future rather than being - as they say - "here, now."

The sadness that had me in its grip was a jumble of things. Missing people who are no longer here, missing opportunities no longer available, questioning the twinges and whatnot that have inevitably settled in as time passes and my body ages. And more things dealing with the past. And to give the future its due, worry about what is in store as those twinges and whatnot may develop into full blown diagnosable things, anticipated sorrow at not being able to do things and progressive slowing, plus the relentless loss of my peers and friends. Yet today, I am in neither of those places so need to shake them off. 

What I'm feeling is the result of things I had no control over (like my genetic make up and where I grew up) plus the result of choices I've made (such as the jobs I've taken and the relationships I've avoided.) My sadness or dissatisfaction with those things is - at the core - sadness or dissatisfaction with myself.

My mother was a very wise women. One who lived with at least occasional depression I'm pretty sure, yet of a generation that didn't become obsessed with "feeling" it or allow it to debilitate her. She was of the school that if she was feeling down, she needed to get busy. I'm not sure  it mattered with what, but just busy - cleaning, cooking, sewing, doing laundry, visiting with her parents, writing a letter to an elderly aunt. All things that got her out of herself and were done with at least a partial if not full focus on others. At the time I saw her life as drudgery, lacking excitement and fulfillment. It wasn't flashy and she wasn't famous or doing "important" things. Now I know that she was doing the most important thing of all - doing what she could that was needed by others. Appreciated by them - too often silently. And she was living a good life. When I remember that I can snap to the present and leave the past and the future alone, at least for a while.  This Thanksgiving, my thanks are for her.