Gratitude

Each time November rolls around, I begin to remember more strongly than other times in the year, how grateful I really am for the people whose lives have brushed mine.

When I was younger, growing up in a small beach town in San Diego, there were so many kindnesses towards me, my friends and family that you could liken it to the amount of grains of sand on that very beach.   Life was not perfect, far from it.  You see, we were a military family.  That is lots of good, right there.  A lot of life's responsibilities are taken care of; you'll never starve, have to buy healthcare and you probably won't experience your father being laid off.  But there were other situations that, while military life did not cause them, it probably added to the likelihood of them happening.  The big one in my family was alcoholism.  For both of my parents.  Ouch.

I could be really depressing and list all of the awfuls that were a part of my life while growing up in that little town.  But that would not do justice to the goodness of life itself.  You see, I believe that when it is all added up, the good will forevermore outweigh the bad.  Those scales may be tipped pretty far to the dark side of things for a long time while you are young.  But eventually, in the end they lean the other way.

I remember a couple of  AHA! moments that radically changed my life.  The first one was when my best friend and fellow Mar Vista High cheerleader, Jenny, died.  Whe was 19 years old and didn't deserve it.  Who ever does?  She was sick with leukemia, got well, and underwent a bone marrow transplant that did not work.  What I took from that - sorry, there are no words to convey the experience even now, 32 years later - is that we are here for just a couple of reasons.  First up is to help each other along our paths.  However that is expressed, from being a good parent or spouse, to reaching out to someone who is hurting with kind words, to praying for something that is too far away for you to put your hands into action, doesn't matter.  What matters is that you do the action to make the difference.  The second thing I learned from Jenny's dying is that you will not be kept out of heaven for any kind of failure, as long as you were trying to do the first thing, help others along the path.  Period.  I don't know if this makes sense, but think about it.  What stops us from truly living a unique, loving, freshly-baked-with-lots-of-butter kind of life?  Certainly, it is what was intended for us all.  The reason is, we are afraid of having a failure on our record.  "What if I'm a failure at school/business/marriage?"  "What if someone doesn't like what I think/do/create?"  I'm here to tell you, get out that shop vac and suck out the foggy smoke!  Behind all of that nonsense is life itself.  Yours. Perfect. Happy. Loved. The only one.  And with it comes Gratitude.   More later....

Love,

TM