What do you have to be grateful for?


Good afternoon to everyone,

In this holiday season, I find myself once again considering the importance of family. For me, I could be absolutely anywhere and it would be great if I had my family with me. So many things have happened and changed this year and so I'm glad to have the consistency of family.

Americans recently celebrated Thanksgiving and I saw an amazing instagram post the other day in honour of it. Someone was talking about how COVID meant that he wasn't able to achieve some of his most highly-prioritised goals and he was feeling like he didn't have much to be grateful. And so he started small - the breath in his lungs, breeze in his air, family around him. And this might sound really cheesy and really old, but as long as we continue to reminisce over everything that did not happen, we will continue to sleepwalk through potentially amazing seasons of our lives. This is not to say that you are not allowed to grieve over what you have lost because you certainly are, but we have to choose to be strong. We have to choose to seek the things that we do still have and make the most of them. We have to choose to remember the things we have to be grateful for when our minds are revolving around the things we are definitely not thankful for. Almost everyday, something happens in my life that I did not plan and could have done without, but I'm learning to stop letting that compeltely control my mood and my identity. If the only thing I know is that change is constant, then the best way to truly protect myself is to be flexible and gracious with myself when I get hit extra hard by these changes. COVID continues to rage and so its lessons should rage just as loud. There is something you have to be grateful for. Why don't you remind yourself now?

God bless.

Dera

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