This day in many homes a thing is going on, a once a year thankfulness thing. If you consider the word ‘thank’, rhymes with spank, frank, dank, lank and with others, you may agree that none of them are pretty words, not in the wordsmith’s library. They all sound like a belly flop. However the celebration is a good thing because just maybe it has ripples. Maybe some will rise from the feast thinking, wondering, deciding that being thankful could be a daily decision. Can you imagine? If we all walked anywhere, everywhere, feeling thankful, not because everything works perfectly with our own plans, because it usually doesn’t, never mind all those things we find irritating or infuriating, those who argued with our own perception of how life ‘should’ be lived, we might accept and move on in kindness. I know that’s a long sentence. Took me a while to get the syncopation and melody into shape.

I know about thankfulness. it has saved me, found me in the dark woods of Dante, found me a new path over and over and over again. See, I think the problems we face are the rocks of doubt and blame and other words that rhyme. We can spend a lifetime, a wastetime, new word, hefting those rocks onto each other until we cannot see a damn thing, not the sunrise, not the moon nonsense, not the neighbours, not the welcome of community. And there’s another thing among things. I have heard and heard, until even my ears groan, that people arrive somewhere and feel isolated. I know, I do, that my own experience doesn’t compare with anyone else’s, but I do want to ask this. Did you actually talk to someone, the neighbour shouting about his fence or the one who sold you a newspaper, or the one who stood blowing a whistle to set your train on it’s tracks, to the street musician who played their guitar with ice on their fingerless gloves, the person who handed over a steaming latte, the old woman you see every morning as you dash for work, her rheumy eyes, the emptiness behind her? Or were you so caught up in your own agenda, your own angst that you thought of nobody else?

The thing about thankfulness is that it is a state of mind. Here’s my wee list. I am thankful for my ridonculous life, for the way it happened without my say so. How I learned my say so a bit late. For my beautiful grown children and for theirs. For the time I have now, the fire in my hearth, my belly, for the mischief in me, the tinkerbell. For the music and for the writing and for all those damn times both wake me at stupid o’clock with words and melodies. For the chuckle in me as I wake. The smell of coffee, for my car, my free-to-go, my community, my wonderful friends. For the daft weather up here, the gales, the falls the lifts, the laughs we have together. For warmth, protection, even for the loneliness because it renders me resourceful and dynamic. Bottom line is this. Love the word Bottom. Sorry, moving on…….

If we could employ thanking, thankfulness whatever, as part of our underwear, let’s say, like knickers, it would become a part of our everythingness. We would put it on every morning, decide to. So that, when something happens, something that irritates, confounds, arrests us, we would be a unit, me and thankfulness and we would respond together. Even in the dark times. It works, it really does.

There are so many lonely people out there.

Happy Thanksgiving to all xx