Grateful List #4: Lots

It's Thanksgiving week.  This is the time of year that people think about those things in life for which they are thankful.

My friend, Janet Broderick, preached about gratitude on Sunday at St. Peter's in Morristown.  It was a beautiful sermon and one I needed to hear.  Here's one of the points she eloquently made:

"It's not happiness that makes us grateful; 

it's gratitude that makes us happy."

What a revelation that was to me.  I've always thought that it's the things I have (not just stuff, but experiences, people in my life, places) that made me happy and that, in turn, makes me grateful. For those things (again, not just the stuff).  But that's not really it at all and that explains why the moments of gratitude are separated ... like dots on a timeline.  Why the time between the moments of gratitude are often unsatisfying.  

It's really the other way around.  Starting with a grateful heart, every minute, allows happiness to flood inside.  Starting from that place of gratitude, enables one to fully realize all the possibilities for joy that exist every day.  Starting from that place of gratitude unleashes the potential for unlimited ways to find happiness.

But gratitude is also a practice.  And those things we call a practice (living a life of gratitude, keeping healthy and fit, prayer or meditation, so many others), require practice.  We aren't good at them the minute we discover them.  We need to keep touching base with these things until they become second nature and are as deep-rooted in our lives as breathing.  Practice.

I needed that sermon on Sunday.  I've always been grateful for the things, people and places in my life. For my job, my fun, and all the rest.  But I've been miserable the last few months and now I know why ... I need to start from a position of gratefulness.  So let the practice begin.

Every day.

It's Thanksgiving Night ....

Today I'm grateful for

... my mom who makes the world's best turkey (for real)

... my children and all my family

... my friends here and there and my twitter family

... and Janet for her words last Sunday

My Own Calendar

We have all sorts of calendars in our lives.  Some run our lives forever.  Some are guides for a period of time.  Calendars help us keep track, mark seasons, remind us of anniversaries, measure our days.

There's the actual calendar year:  January 1 - December 31.  We begin the year with good intentions, resolutions and some looking back.  The calendar year contains birthdays, holidays, and deadlines (tax time, for example).

There's a sort of natural seasonal calendar.  For lots of people the new year starts with the promise of spring.  Bulbs bursting and new, warm sunny days.  The seasons follow one after the other with a predictable rhythm that's comforting and reassuring.

When you have children your life is governed by the school calendar.  Your new year's day is the first day of school.  The most anticipated holiday (for kids) is the last day of school.  Lots of other areas of life align with the school calendar ... sports teams, dance classes, scout meetings, piano lessons.  In most places, the school year is but 10 months long followed by a 2-month respite that is probably about 2 weeks too long for most parents.

In my life, the liturgical calendar drives much of how I perceive the year.  The liturgical calendar in mainstream Christian churches begins on the first day of Advent, typically shortly after Thanksgiving.  It is the Sunday nearest to St. Andrew's Day (November 1).  The seasons of the liturgical calendar have always made the most sense to me and, as an adult, especially while I was a church employee, I was "religious" about living my life according to the liturgical calendar.  I tried to keep a holy advent, the season of anticipation, not rushing headlong into Christmas (although I did decorate).  I kept Christmas for the whole of the Christmas season, leaving the decorations and lights up until Epiphany.  Lent, Easter, Pentecost ... these are the natural rhythms of my life.

I took a crazy class in college.  It was called The Psychology of Creativity.  I took it because I thought, since music was one of my majors, it would provide some sort of insight into ... I don't know what.  I'm not sure I learned anything--actually I'm pretty sure I learned nothing.  I think it was one of those classes where the students are all guinea pigs for a professor who's doing some sort of research.  We had to present a unique "creative" project at some point in the class.  I think we were supposed to come up with something totally original.  This was mine:  I made a calendar out of plasticine (that rubbery play dough stuff).  Even 'way back then I wished I could "shorten bad days and stretch out the good ones" at will.  My one and only friend in the class said my project was "lame."  (His was beer jello ... it was college.)

The last few years I've reverted to my plasticine calendar.  I'm thinking about this today, a Sunday.   The Sunday on which we celebrated the Feast of All Saints.  No where near to Advent, let alone Christmas.  And yet I am unapologetically watching Christmas movies on television all night long.  Dear, sweet, romantic Christmas movies--not the goofy Santa ones.  This is the sort of thing I would never have done in the past.   I'd have railed at the networks for rushing things, for interrupting the natural rhythm of liturgical propriety, for skipping the getting ready of Advent and going straight for the prize of Christmas.

But I've loosened up in middle age.  I suppose I should deny myself this small pleasure to be truly liturgically correct.  But I don't care to.  I don't mind that Christmas has oozed ahead of Thanksgiving and has stretched itself into a larger part of the seasons of my life.  I love lights and red plaid bows, and cheesy Christmas music and sacred Christmas music, the movies and books.  I still understand the meaning of the seasons.  But it couldn't be wrong to enjoy my favorite seasons beyond the dates that bind them into their points in time.  Could it? 

This is my "lame" project coming to life.

~~~~~

Two songs I listen to "out of season:"

Sara Bareilles, Love is Christmas
Colby Caillat & Gavin DeGraw, Baby It's Cold Outside