Today I am grateful for life.  Life isn’t easy and there are daily reminders how precious and fleeting this existence can be.  I attended a memorial yesterday for a long time family friend’s mother (she was essentially a bonus grandmother to me).  I’ve been to hundreds of memorials in my life for all sorts of people under all sorts of circumstances and the thing that always strikes me is the fragility of it all.  Like one piece of the puzzle is missing and we are all present and witness to the fact that this person is no longer here, we all feel a degree of emptiness, all of our lives are changed…but what now?  It’s always a matter of finding peace and moving forward.  Of accepting what we thought we couldn’t accept.  It’s witnessing the people we saw as the strongest figures in our lives losing the person that was THEIR strongest figure and suddenly we see the frailty of it all.  It doesn’t matter how old we are, when we lose that presence in our lives, we lose a piece of our identity.  So we still work to find this balance between loving life and being present all while valuing what is important but not being attached.  It’s no small feat.  But I am 100% certain that one way to keep that progress in the journey toward balance is to honor those we love and cherish the time we have with them while they are here.  Honor the time we have here.  Live the life we are meant to live for the sake of the gift of life.    

Today I am grateful for laughter.  Genuine belly laughs with people we love is one of the most healing things we can do.  Sometimes we need that reminder that it’s ok to let go and to simply enjoy the moment—or even just to sit with the craziness of a particular situation where all you can do is laugh.  When my son was only a few months old we had gotten a new stroller the day before I was to take my mom to the eye doctor.  I knew how to open it and I was all good to go with getting him set in it but when we left, I couldn’t figure out how to collapse it to get it back in the car.  I thought I did—but I didn’t.  So my mom had her eyes dilated, I have a 5 month old in the back seat and I’m freaking out that I don’t know how to collapse this damn thing to get it back in the car.  My mom tried helping and I was cursing everyone under the sun because I couldn’t figure this out.  I remember I screamed one last curse out in frustration and my mom and I went silent and looked at each other….and busted up laughing.  Dealing with life is like that.  There will always be something we aren’t quite sure how to do that we thought we had an understanding of and then life throws us a curveball.  Life, loss, love, all of it requires a sense of humor and trust.  If we have some people we can still laugh with regardless of what we have been through, we are truly fortunate.   

Today I am grateful for knowing what’s for me.  We ran into someone from many years past at an event recently.  Normally I’m uncomfortable or awkward in those situations—how do they remember me, do they really remember me, they were part of x crowd so who are we now that we are adults?  Regardless, this individual started talking about other people from that same crowd from over two decades ago and instead of feeling awkward or longing for some sort of inclusion, I felt completely secure in not needing to know anything about these people.  I fully accepted and understood that they knew a version of me then and we haven’t spoken in over two decades so they have no clue who I am now or what I went through to get to where I’m at now—I’m not going to collapse into that girl trying to impress people, hoping they like her when you were on the periphery of my life anyway.  You don’t know me now and if you had any interest in knowing me, we’d have stayed in touch along the way.  You would have been part of my journey.  I made it here on my own and I don’t have any desire to go back, to rehash those moments.  I’m proud, I’m aware, I’m comfortable letting that part of my past go. 

Today I am grateful for genuine bonding with people who know us.  While at the memorial, it was fascinating to hear from our loved one’s friends, sharing stories from the past and how they formed and the lives they lived.  It was so cool to see a different facet of who they are and how their curiosity brought them together, how common interests kept them going, and how mutual support got them through various moments in their lives.  It was awesome to hear how they didn’t let some of the darkest moments in life define them.  They used those moments to figure out how to help others.  They created systems of support for people who’d had similar experiences and they made contributions to life and made sure to live life to the fullest every opportunity they got.  Seeing the genuine sisterhood between women who were not of the same blood but loved each other stronger than that made me ever more grateful for my best friend as well—because she needed me to hold space for her and I did and in that space we filled it with our own memories and laughter and I know that is something I will carry with me forever.

Today I am grateful for communication.  No one is meant to spend their life silent.  We communicate in so many different ways—sometimes we communicate when we don’t think we do or we think we have communicated and we’ve really done nothing.  Words are beautiful to me and I love using them.  I love the stories and the lilt and the dance and the sound of them.  I love the sound of the keyboard as I type the words in my head.  For all the ways we have to communicate with each other, we are kind of crappy at it.  Communicating takes a lot of practice and intention.  We are born without words yet we let the entire world know what we need.  We just need to hone that as we get older.  Never lose that voice, never lose that skill.  Always believe.  We have a voice for a reason and we are given a brain to create ideas to be conveyed through that voice.  We have a body that speaks for us, we have eyes that tell every story we’ve ever experienced.  We see it and if we take our time with it we can get really good at letting people know what we mean.  And when we say what we mean and mean what we say then it starts to get good. Some people aren’t comfortable experiencing direct communication because it feels like an attack in a world that tells us the truth is violent.  But I am so grateful to use these skills to get to the root. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.