Counting Your Blessings
By: Danny Thomas
The end of the year has, oh, since I was a young kid, been a time of reflection for me…
it happens by reflex
reflex reflection….
I suppose it comes with all the thoughtfulness of Christmastime…
and the inevitable letdown that happens after so much celebration…
I suppose it comes from the tendency of society at large to look back
at the end of the year, to review… I guess, even if I tried, I couldn’t help but get caught up in the swell of wistfulness that the end of the year brings.
I am not big on resolutions, my feeling is that if I want to make a change in my life, I should be able to do that at any time, and waiting for the end of the year is a cop out. But, I enjoy the opportunity to take a look at the year and the choices I made, and to examine the path(s) that lead me to those choices… I try to be objective about the outcomes, not to place too much judgment on the outcomes, I try to not look at them as wins and fails, but rather as turns on a path, forks in a road. I think the analysis is good and I honor the reflex, I think an opportunity for analysis is an opportunity for progress…
But I end up with a feeling of general malaise, uncertainty….
Because so many of those questions don’t have answers…
They are all the what if’s…
The coulda shoulda woulda’s…
And the other side of that coin – the unknowable future…
We are up for a lot of big changes… I need to stop waiting for things to settle… chaos is the routine, it seems…
The constant changes, the things that fall away, the things we try to cling to…
Two nights ago, those thoughts and questions kept me up late into the night… or late into the early morning really…I avoided thinking about them, writing about them, I watched mindless television, folded laundry, surfed the internet, but those doubts about my path persisted… Eventually I made my way up to bed, tired, but still distracted, and trying to distract myself from that distraction by reading… eventually my mind lost the battle with my eyes and they slammed shut.
Two minutes later ‘Zilla came in and asked for snuggles…
Knowing, or rather, hoping that the weariness I had just succumbed to would pull me easily back into the land of nod, I followed ‘Zilla back to her bed, lay down next to her and rested my hand on her back…
It took all of about 30 seconds to feel my mood change…
The words from a song in White Christmas which has been on heavy rotation in our house this holiday season came to mind…
As I lay there listening to my girl’s breath, I started to count my blessings and it brought me back in to the moment…
And, while I do believe that there is value in taking stock in the year, and looking at where you’ve come to in the year, and that one can’t help but plan for the future a little bit, just to exist…
The key is now.
For me one of the things that keeps me tethered to the now, that keeps me in the moment, or maybe makes it okay for me to exist here, is my family.
I have many blessings to be grateful for, my family helps me see that, and for that I am most grateful of all…
