The Attitude Is Gratitude

I've been inundated with gratitude lately.  All kinds of folks are doing 30-gratitude journals on Facebook.  Our sermon series has been asking us to move from being grateful for the good things that drop in our laps to having a grand response to the goodness of life in everybody.  A tall order.  While I appreciate the encouragement, I just don't have it in me.

I  need to start lower and slower to get me past my slumpy grumps.

Here are the basics: 1.  Our ScottMan is home for Thanksgiving.  Our brilliant car guy is coming home from Texas.  We only get to see him a couple of times a year now, but I am plenty grateful for that.  2.  Our Miss Mackenzie is at a crux in her life, between school and career.  What a tough time that is.    She is our multi-talented artiste with too many interests to choose just one—in a state that is 49th in economic recovery.  We appreciate her and how tough this battle is.  3.  I appreciate that I have an extended family that still gets together for holidays, and Maggie is a great cook.  Not everybody gets that. 4.  Julie is doing well, going through six-year retests for her cancer.  Nervousing, which is why I'm a grump.  In spite of that, we are overwhelmingly grateful for her life and her generosity of spirit.   5.  I still can write, maybe even better than before.  Keeping up with brilliant young techies who are internet investigators and attorneys.  Now that pleases me.

So, doing a little better here.

Next up, the secondary, tertiary gratitudes:  1. I am so grateful for my church and the foundation it provides for my life.  I am quickly reaching my kitty, naps, and tea years,  and finding that there are few "rules" doesn't impinge my freedoms, but frames them.  2.  I am deeply grateful for my kitty, my champion snuggler.  3.  I am so grateful for my friendships, which feel more like family now, anyways.  4.  Things still interest me: books,  weather patterns, riotous ideas fueled by a sensibility of helping other folks, a really good belly laugh.  5.  What is important is very important, and what isn't. . . isn't.  I am increasingly abysmal at hiding the difference.

Deep sigh here.

And lastly, a couple of things that  hardly matter, except that they do:  1.  I'm so grateful that I can still make a really decent pie.  A succulence.  Fed fathers, uncles, and grand fathers, traveling physicians and their families, brothers, cousins, and three sterling friends, an officer and two professional drivers; nephews and nieces who adored them when they were little, little kids.  Comes in handy this time of the year.  And 2.  I catch onto skullduggery, outright lies, brouhahas, undeterred silliness, pufffery, idiocy, miswhacks. and dipsy-doodles ever so much faster.

Must mean I'm still learning.

So grateful for that.  Makes me smile.