Sweetened and Spurred on by Gratitude

I still have not managed to get the pictures off of my camera, soon.. and I will post the magical trip to bring my son back home.

Miscellany 

A lot has been running through my mind, I have a friend who was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cervical cancer... so I promptly called my gyn to schedule my exam and learned that I hadn't been in the office for over three years. Considering that I am most likely perimenopausal, there is a certain amount of shame in that. I think (*think*) that I may have been screened by my primary care physician in that time, but this is still not a good thing.

Get your screenings people. And your immunizations.

Gratitude

I am not too shy to tell anyone how much I love this new Pope. I find it intriguing that people can even get him to make up some sort of Top 10 list... So there is this.

I was struck by the last line, which I am condensing here "May we be always more grateful...".

So true, some people do not come to gratitude well... I image that is true about myself as well, since gratitude is something I feel like I am continually working on.  I have been thinking about my facebook gratitude project from a few years ago, it was hard, but that is for a lot of reasons. One of the things that inspired it was someone whom I thought was a friend revealing that they were not, in fact a friend at all.... it was the opposite really.

So, gratitude, still in my thoughts in terms of how to make it part of the abundance of my life... I really and lucky and aware of the privilege of my life circumstances. 

I have been trying to see where I can find the gratitude in the dark things, the hard things, and even the mean and ugly things. Talk about hard!

"Gratitude spurs us on to prove ourselves worthy of what others have done for us." ~ Wilferd A. Peterson

I feel challenged by this, not that I will be looking at the mean and ugly and trying to find something magical in in, but that I can't imagine this is going to be easy.

Today, I feel old... my body is full of aches, I feel lost to the self indulgent importance I had in my narcissistic youth, I am hanging on the poorly thought out suggestions people have made to me.

How do I find the gratitude in that?

I need to deconstruct this today thing:

• I am feeling old - which means I am alive.
• My body aches, which means I need to listen to it more carefully, but I am aware enough to notice that.
  
• I feel unimportant - but I am a mother, wife, daughter and in clear scientific (in the social science way) know that is just not true.
• Poorly thought out suggestions - I can look deep into what is the truth that is buried in them, find the kernel that makes them sting and identify what I lament, find those and I can work on changing those.