Happy Holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. :)

One of the best things we can do today is right in the holiday's name: give thanks. Be grateful for good stuff in our lives. Doing that provides perspective frequently absent in the grind of daily activity.

All of us learn at some point that life contains both good and bad. As a child I believed adulthood would be one fate or the other. I was wrong. Premature deaths of my mother and brother in the early 1990s showed me harsh reality. Alongside grief, however, my life also contains happiness, beauty, insight and pleasure. Receiving mixed experiences it's up to us to decide what to focus on. The good or the bad.

My life right now is the ultimate half-full glass. I have one eye that works and one that doesn't. I have one ear that works and a second that doesn't. I have one leg that's pain-free and another that isn't. I'm half-blind, half-deaf and half-lame. Destiny has given me the metaphorical half-full glass with precise accuracy and challenges me to figure out how to react.

We all face this choice over and over again. Our decisions define us. Attitudes we adopt, strength we muster or fail to summon affect our present and future. I struggled this year with darkness bleaker than I knew existed and understand why some folks give up. In pits of despair you can't see the light of normal life; sometimes you don't even know which way is up. You struggle and hope or surrender and die. The situation can become that stark.

I'm grateful to be alive, to see partially, to hear most of what's said in conversation. Suffering for months I clung to hope of someday returning to society. I wasn't sure my impairments would allow that. I wanted to re-connect with friends. I wanted to continue experiencing joy. Then, good news arrived: I can do these things. Not without obstacles, not without effort but I can be happy. You saw a few days ago that buddies of mine -- whose comaraderie I've enjoyed for 20 years -- rescued me with a day-long motorcycle trip. That's something I was sure was lost to my future. But past friendship paid off in major ways. Other friends have similarly stepped up and eased my new burdens. The lesson: as long as we're alive there's reason to hope. We should not give up.

So, today, I'm thankful for my life. Half the glass may have spilled out but another half remains. That's enough to work with. On this holiday try to appreciate what is in your glass, as full or empty as it is. Happy holidays!