Notes From My Journal

Thanksgiving Morning in Nicaragua

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Thursday, November 22, 2018

This year’s to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade featured a musical vignette from Prom, a new Broadway play that opened to great reviews. My niece, Izzy McCalla has a leading role in it. They were scheduled to be on TV at 8:15. At 8:00 we turned on the TV in the den of our house here, but we couldn’t locate it. So we rushed down to the clubhouse, begged the workers to turn on the bar TV and then Number Three Son Michael frantically searched through their larger selection of channels looking for the international channel that would be carrying it.
At 8:14 he was still searching. Everyone — including from Helen my mother in law to Francis my grandson — was yelling at him. “Hurry!”
Then, at 8:15 exactly, the image of Izzy and her costar appeared on screen. We had found it at the very moment it began….!
So we saw the whole thing, thanking our lucky stars and bragging to the restaurant workers ….Esa es nuestra prima! Esa es nuestra sobrina!

 

It’s Thanksgiving – a Good Time to Count Your Many Blessings

Nicaragua

Your wealth:

You haven’t hit the Forbes list of wealthiest humans, but you have enough money to put clothes on your back, a roof over your head, and food in your stomach. “The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts,” H.U. Westermayer reminds us. “No Americans have been more impoverished than these, who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.”

However meager your financial assets are now, they greatly exceed those of the great majority of the world’s population. So be thankful for that.

Your health:

You have aches. You have pains. You may have illness and infirmity. But if there are times during the day when you can enjoy yourself by yourself or with other people… you have something to be thankful for.

Your wisdom:

There are so many mysteries, so many unanswered questions. You know only a fraction of what you’d like to know, but you understand the most important things. You realize that of the gifts of life, three are most important.

* Consciousness: the greatest natural gift — your innate and inalienable (see Today’s Word, below) ability to experience the world around you, to notice and to appreciate a million possible things.

* Connections: the limitless possibilities you have to have good and loving moments with your family, your friends, and with virtually everyone you have the chance to speak to every day.

* Creativity: the potential of your imagination — the capacity to do what you want with your mind, which is, after all, where your life is located.

Be thankful for that.

Your work:

For many, work is a chore. But it doesn’t have to be that way for you. You have the ability to find work you love, or love the work you do. It’s about freedom — the freedom to desist from seeing yourself as a victim and to take responsibility for your future, regardless of whatever disadvantages you have now or obstacles that lie before you.

Be thankful for that, too.

Oxygen:

Each breath is another gift.

Be thankful.