This Thanksgiving was weird for us, because Diana worked in the evening. This wasn't one of those crappy retail job things, but rather the theater where she works had a show. It just happened to be that the sequel to Phantom of The Opera is in town this week (which is horrible, and worthy of its own blog post). We delayed the family dinner by a day.
This has been a difficult year, in a lot of ways, most of which I don't write publicly about. It's the first time in years that I've felt a "weight" on me that I couldn't entirely control, and that resulted in a certain amount of stress and bursts of discontent. Now that we're nearing the end of the year, I'm reflecting more on it, and the thing I'm most thankful for is perspective.
Challenges aside, I had a great year of work, and while it wasn't planned, we moved into a house that better suits our needs and wants. Indeed, things could be worse. The thing that really drove this home was a chat with an electrician that visited our house. He seemed like a pretty cool guy, did good work, and we got on the topic of unexpected things happening. That's when he mentioned losing two daughters in the same year, and seeing his own health go downhill fast. That's a lot of terrible stuff for one year.
Perspective is a gift. The hard part is acknowledging it while right-sizing the reaction to the scope of your own challenges. Just because there are "children starving in Africa," as your mom used to say, doesn't invalidate the way you feel about something. Indeed, the measure of our character is in how we react adversity.
No comments yet.