Happy Thanksgiving

Give Thanks For What ???

As I read the news, it is filled with specific and obvious reasons why the last thing on my mind should be to give thanks for the world we live in. Social, Political, Religious, and Financial upheaval. Should I give thanks for that?

But then I look at myself. My own situation and I see a microcosm of the same story. My house should literally be condemned. My income has gone from little to almost non existent. I’m divorced. I see my two children rarely. My political party has been thoroughly trashed in the last election in my County.

I heat with wood and each day I’m splitting or hauling wood into the house. Each morning my house is close to freezing and I have to huddle over my wood stove to keep warm and have my first cup of coffee.

I live in constant worry that the city will shut me down and condemn my house forcing me out into the streets. Onto the Dole. I just continue to do what I do, and paying my property taxes has become over the years my first priority. Without a house all the freedom I have to do what I want disintegrates into the freedom to live in another’s world with out the wherewithal to do anything I want.

The reason I give thanks today and everyday is that I have the ability to hope, to see past life. I have as we all do an imagination. The blessing, the gift comes in my ability to imagine the beautiful side of life. This blessing is a learned behavior.

It can be taught by people who have been beaten down and risen above their struggles. Much as a runner “hitting the wall” and has to dig deeper, to find their inner strength, and in so doing find a peace of mind from the doing. So too have I taught myself inner peace and contentment by taking satisfaction in overcoming the obstacles to freedom in my life. Heating with wood gives me that sense of freedom to control my life that few have even considered.

Nor do I suggest it. I simply suggest that we teach ourselves to look for and appreciate those things in life that we have control over and find the peace of mind from doing them, instead of letting others do them for us. Learn to give thanks for the freedom of mind that the work of “doing” accomplishes as nothing else quite does.

What is Thanksgiving but a re-enactment of our ancestors reveling in the bounty of overcoming all their hardships, through long hours of hard arduous work. Work I might add that only amounted to enough food to get them through the winter. The work they had to do was work that “Americans won’t do” anymore. At least the work bureaucrats in Washington won’t do. Then again I imagine peace of mind there is in short supply.

A sense of self worth has to be earned in this world.

It is hard to explain the “warmth of mind” I feel every morning in the winter as I become toasty warm from, then the bounty I realize I have created as I have to move further away from my wood stove, to stay comfortable. This is a direct in your face daily affirmation of the choice I have always in front of me, as to whether I will embrace freedom and use it to create my own self worth or give it away to others to let them feel important.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Live Dangerously Be A Conservative