Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving now rivals Christmas as my favorite day. Another of the many regrets emerging with advancing years is that I did not have at a younger age the depth of gratitude I now have for the wealth of blessings with which God equipped me for life and which I recognize now as present moment-to-moment.

For most of my life I took it as a badge of honor, and as the only responsible way to live, to put upon myself the harshest interpretation of whatever situation I was in. To me, to do so was smart, because if I could figure out a way to cope with the worst that could happen, then I could survive. This was not simply "glass half-empty" psychology, because more often than not what I reckoned as worst-case scenario is usually what happened : life has been one continuous "how do I get across the kitchen, how do I get to where Louis is standing over there" challenge, the whole way. By and large, this approach has served me well, because I have overcome the challenges, for the most part, and that's because I have seen things accurately, harsh and difficult though they may be. Indeed, it's been when I've expected more, when I've expected life to be easier, when I've made the big mistakes. So time and again, it's been back to the bunker whenever I've been stricken after venturing too far away from it, having thought "the war is over and I can come out now".

But living life and surviving life are different. Proceeding with a survival mentality produces only survival, not life. The cost of that mentality is to see the goal of life as staying at "zero", not rising above it. Of course, I've known these platitudes for years, but I did not know how to transcend what I've satisfied myself is indeed a realistic perception of the world and my place in it. I tried "glass half-full", I even tried throwing off concern for survival (with disastrous results, naturally). It's only now that I am coming to realize that it's not my view of reality that's been wrong, or my psychology for being in the world, that needed to change. Rather, it's the objects of perception, even the objects of my psychology, which should have been and is now different : instead of seeing life subjectively as it affects me, I should have been seeing life and what's important in it, as both subject and object. I.E., I am slowly learning that seeing life as it is, not only as it effects me or my welfare, is the necessary predicate to becoming aware of deep value of what is good in life - people, things, that are not me, and which have the capacity to bring joy to life in themselves, independent of and without the filter of me as subject.

Thusly presented, I see that I am surrounded by blessed people who bring joy to my life to a degree I have not always appreciated; I see that my life is good; I see that I have been given, now, the grace of God to realize my good fortune before it's too late or not at all. And what that means is that I am glad to be me, glad to see things the way I do, content. Thanksgiving, indeed.