Month of Gratitude, Week Four: Resilience

I don’t have much to say this week. I hope that all of you reading this had a good holiday if you celebrated Thanksgiving, and if you didn’t, I hope you had a good week in general.

I've been physically in pretty bad shape still, but I got to enjoy the holiday. I anticipated it being more difficult since this was the first holiday without my mother. It was definitely difficult but my family and I managed to still celebrate and enjoy our time together. It definitely won’t ever be the same. My mom was my ally in the family; she was the only one as weird as me. We had the same humor. She was the person who loved me the most in this world. She was my best friend. 

Now it feels like a piece of my soul is irrevocably gone. 

But it’s ok. 

The thing with surviving something traumatic and devastating is you think you can’t survive it. And then somehow you do. You put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.

I can survive it. I can keep going. I’ve built up a pretty strong reserve of resilience the last few years.

That’s what I’m thankful for this week: resilience. Before I got ill, I was a survivor but I don’t think I was very resilient. It’s taken years and quite a bit of training to learn resilience. You have to with illness or you’d never be able to get out of bed every day.

Resilience means hope

It means acceptance

It means survival

It means renewal

And renewal is a promise for a better day 

I’m not consciously feeling resilient right now but I know it’s there. I know it’s my life support that is keeping me going. It’s giving me strength unconsciously.

I’m grateful for that strength to enjoy every bit of life right now: spending energy on creativity, seeing my friends, watching their children get older, spending time with my family, eating pumpkin pie, watching Star Trek with husband, going outside, relishing that first note when I play a song, breathing in chilly autumn days, drinking a good, strong cup of tea.

Every bit of it.

I hope you had moments to savor this week too, and whatever battle you are fighting, that your resilience is sailing you to the other side as well. 

Outside to walk a few feet with my trekking poles. Who could ask for more?

Month of Gratitude, Week 3: Little Things

I’ve been trying to come up with a focal point for this week’s post about gratitude, but the only I can really think of is being thankful for being alive and appreciating the little things right now.

My heart is very heavy after the attacks in Paris, my body is exhausted from a string of appointments, and I’m still in throes of grief. One of my best friends just lost her mother this week as well, and I’ve known her family for 20 years. I’m just trying to take a step back and feel some gratitude that despite the physical and emotional wounds we have all acquired, we survived them, and in that survival there is solidarity—a collective spirit that life must press on.

I was so weepy this week that I’ve reached new levels of absurdity. I was watching that video of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to “Uptown Funk” that’s been circulating everywhere and I started crying a few seconds in. I dare anyone to watch it and find a reason to cry. I at least had a good laugh about the absurdity of it. 

Even though my body wasn’t able to exercise much this week, I still went for my daily walk almost every day. It’s been a bit warm this week but I’m loving the hazy autumn days. I'm always grateful each day when I am able to get outside just for a few minutes. On bedridden days, I dream of taking my short walk.

One of the trees next to my house has gone full autumn

It’s supposed to get colder next week and dip under freezing temperatures. That doesn’t happen much in these parts because we live in varying stages of living at the center of the sun most of the time, so I’m very much looking forward to that cold. I love the cold. I prefer the cold.

Thanksgiving is next week and it’s going to be a really rough one. I’d say Thanksgiving and Halloween are my favorite holidays and my mom and I always watched the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the dog show that follows together. I’m not sure I’ll watch it this year, but if I do the sight of the inflatable Snoopy or Minions floating down the parade route will leave me in tears. I'll be laughing at the same time.

The rest of the year is going to be packed with gatherings, including my husband’s birthday. He is having a birthday party for the first time in years and I’m very much looking forward to it. His birthday is at the beginning of December and when I was teaching or in grad school that was always the busiest time of year for me so his birthday celebrations have been unfortunately minimal in the past. I hope we can make up for it this year. Our four year old nephew’s birthday is the day before my husband’s so I kept telling him he should have a dinosaur –themed co-birthday party. Maybe next year.

Then we’ll have our annual NYE gathering at my parent’s house and since my step-father is moving out of state, this will be the last one there. I’m terribly sad about all of it but I’m trying to remind myself to enjoy these moments since everything has changed and will continue to change.

That’s the strange thing about life. You think that everything will just somehow continue as it has been. That the march of time will somehow leave the details of life, the simple things we take for granted, untouched. But that’s not how it works.

I’ve been re-learning Christmas music to play at the assisted care facility where my mom was, and it’s been probably a decade since I’ve learned more than just a few songs this time of year. It’s given me a reason to practice with purpose and I’ve been playing every day.  I’m very much looking forward to playing music for them and sharing some joy. They are a great audience and deserve some joy.

I even sang an entire verse of a song this week, which is an improvement over what I have been able to do. I hope that’s a sign I can someday make it through an entire song.

This is what I save my spoons for

I hope you also had some little things that made you feel gratitude this week. We could all use some joy in whatever form we can find.