Happy Thanksgiving
Thanks for joining the journey with me on Substack. It’s an honor and a pleasure to have an audience.
There’s no shortage of advice in life on the power of gratitude. It’s one of those things that gets said so often that it starts to lose meaning. In my experience, it’s also one of the few things in this life that is grounded on a powerful truth about the way we’re designed. Bitterness and hate, the culprits of the worst of us, never really hold up in a heart full of thanks. They’re limited by the emotional physics of things. Gratitude takes up all the space.
You can be grateful and feel sadness. You can be grateful and feel the pain of loss. You can be grateful and feel anger. But it’s damn hard to be bitter when you surround your thoughts with appreciation for all you have. And it’s hard to hate without bitterness. And so spending some time with what we have instead of what we don’t, of who and why we love instead of why we don’t, in the cosmically unlikely event of our existence in this place and this time in the arc of the universe, is as good a regular exercise as you’ll find.
As for me, I never in a million years imagined the life I would live today. Not because my life is better or worse than my hopes or fears. But because it’s the one life never lived until I lived it with the beautiful people in it. So I thought I’d share a short spot of it with you all.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
When you said his disability is not a blessing and he is not perfect the way he is, and the trauma parents go through...
Yes, yes, yes...to all of this.
And yes to the love we feel for them where they are, and gratitude for the village. My son has a different path, to a different mine, but where would he be without his village? And we certainly wouldn't still be married without their support.
Your writing is part of our village. The way you humbly share your journey of gathering knowledge, of contemplation, of disappointment and joy, of the minutiae of life, of being a Vet; and of being a parenting team who is trying to do what is best - sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, sometimes being grateful for that one good day and of allowing it to be ok to know that most people will not understand, and oftentimes we don't understand, and that it is necessary and ok for us to have a life outside of caring for them.
We hold so much gratitude for your words. Blessings to you and your family this Thanksgiving.