Full of It

Gratitude.

Yeah I know.  It's the week of Thanksgiving.  Everyone and their momma is going to be blogging about, teaching about, talking about gratitude.  And being thankful.  And how lucky we all are and how we should be soooo thankful for everything we have.  Which we should.  Life is indeed great.  These ARE the days (@Max).  I AM stupidly blessed.  Beyond reason.  Can't even really fully comprehend how fortunate I am.  Blessed.

Homemade card from that 3-year-old

But that's easy for me to say right now because I spent the day inside where it's warm (very important now that the temperature is a number my body does not compute).  And in the company of a lovely three year old and her amazing parents.  So yeah I can bow my head and express thanks.  Easy peasy.  Done and done.

However, having a truly grateful heart is being able to express that same thanksgiving when your car doesn't start, or your computer crashes, or your heart gets broken.  Those things.  The yucky.  Icky.  Annoying.  Kick you right in the gut things.  We're often not too keen on saying thank you for them.  Instead we let loose a string of words that would curl my Nana's toes.  We shake our fists at the sky and carry chips around on our shoulders.

Yet we'll write laundry lists of thanks for the birds, and the sky, and our warm beds, and the flowers, and all the things that are pretty and easy to love.  But last time I checked that bird didn't force me to grow.  Didn't jab me awake.  Or move me to make a change.

Her note to me

At least not the way say (and I'm just going to go straight for the big one), a dead mommy does*.  No a dead mommy, a broken car, a crashed computer, a smashed relationship.  Those things shake you up.  Make you take stock.  They are the real things we should be thankful for.  Because I bet if you close your eyes and look back on your life those tragedies.  Those short comings.  Those losses that blindsided you on a random Tuesday.  Those are the very things that have given you the life you have now.  And isn't that great?

Had my mom not died I would have NEVER gone to grad school.  I would have never moved West.  And right here.  Right now.  I am exactly where I need to be.  So, as odd as this sounds, I'm grateful for that.  I'm grateful that I can see the good.  That I can bow my head and express thanks for all the parts of my life.  Even the most horrible.  Even the saddest.  Even the muckiest.  Because without dark there would be no light.  And I have so much light.

I love you all so much.  And I'm so grateful for each of you.  Even the ones of you I don't know.  You all have such beautiful lives.  Even if they don't seem that way.

XO,
Sara

*For those of you who don't know me my mom died from Ovarian cancer when I was 22.  I tell dead mommy jokes as a way of coping.  Stop being offended.  My mother would have loved it.  She did after all tell me to, "Play the sympathy card as much as possible."  So I'm fairly certain she is in no way scathed by this.  Just go with it.