APW: Giving Thanks

Well I’ll pick a planet and you can pick a star,
We’ll plot our points together we can travel very far our path is winding,
We can’t rewind but if we move with grace and speed,
We’ll watch it all again from depths we’ve never dreamed
 

Giving thanks.  Oh man.  That’s a big one.  I can’t think of a holiday I would rather celebrate and share with others than this one.  I reflect on this fourth Thursday of November how the years have come and gone.  I am writing about this holiday, as I have before in the past, only this time I am a year older.  I have celebrated this day with Americans and confused foreigners in Australia, splitting wood competitions with Mormons on a farm in Nevada, in Hana multiple times with the best of friends, and going back further, back in New York with my family, where you require a sweatshirt during the day.

Coming to the realization that five years have elapsed since I’ve had a Thanksgiving in New York helps validate the lapse of time and the extreme changes in myself that’ve taken place in this past half of a decade.  I have embraced many different cultures, jobs, residences, lifestyles, landscapes, climates in the last five years.  I’ve met innumerable amounts of people who have profoundly impacted my life, and have undergone experiences that I did not see or want to occur in such a way. 

There will always be sadness.  There will always be happiness.  And of course, there is the ever present gratitude and the all knowing goodness that bends, flows and loves like the river Time.

On this day, I will allow, which I haven’t recently, some time for reflection.  I will hold onto each memory I have shared with the people I love, and the people I’ve lost.  I will remember them and live the best as I can, care as great as they, laugh as hard, love and smile as much.

Cycles roll on like the waves and the moon, the playing cards stuck in bicycle tires and the quarters in the juke box, playing that tune that lasts longer than we remember them.

I’ve watched others come full circle, and I’ve experienced it myself.  I’ve experienced it with relationships and I see it in the garden.  Even the asymmetrical figures contain a balance.  I’m learning to live without expectation, to push myself without reward.  It’s all very simple.  If you’re grateful for the day, you’re better off than being resentful.  We have been given so much.  Thankful that I can now open my eyes and acknowledge that, and do my best in the present to give back to the future.

If we don’t stop seeking, we won’t stop finding.

Matt