#112 - Giving Thanks

In a blog post on the eve of Thanksgiving, Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations With God series of books (among others), made the unique and I thought inspired suggestion to abolish Thanksgiving as a holiday and instead make it a holy day.

While that in and of itself was enough to make me take notice, what I found unique and inspiring was a suggestion he made later in his post with regard to how Thanksgiving is celebrated:

Forget about sitting down to a big meal and offering thanks to God for all the bounty that has been received during the past year. Instead, create a new ritual. Sit down together and thank God for all the goodness that is to come.

He believes we should discuss those things in the coming year for which we are going to be thankful. In other words, looking ahead rather than looking back. As he has stated in Conversations With God:

. . . the message about gratitude is clear. It is the most powerful form of prayer. Gratitude in advance, not gratitude after the fact. This is because to thank God in advance for something is the highest form of faith. It is a statement of supreme confidence. It is the Ultimate Knowing.

Walsch goes so far as to suggest making a list and writing down all that you choose to have happen between Thanksgiving 2011 and Thanksgiving 2012 and then reading it aloud at dinner. He says doing so will give Thanksgiving a new meaning:

It will now be about Sharing and Declaring. It will be about Knowing and Growing. We grow into what we know.

I'm certainly willing to give it a try. So here is my list:

1. I will be thankful for all of the opportunities I have in the coming year to spend time RVing and reconnecting with nature. Spending five weeks without our truck and still being without our trailer makes me realize just how precious those moments are.
2. I will be thankful for the love and patience of my wife, Teresa. She has been and continues to be my anchor (a term I use in a good way), helping me to stay grounded and giving me someone to laugh and cry with.
3. I will be thankful for all of my Facebook friends, people from my past and present, as well as those I have yet to meet. They help to bring to life memories of the places I've been as well as the places I still hope to see.
4. I will be thankful for new challenges and new opportunities to grow. The last few years have been some of the best of my life in terms of growing and learning to better accept myself. I suspect the coming year will bring more of the same.
5. I will be thankful (or at least strive to be thankful) for the challenges of dealing with a teenage autistic son. It now looks like we may have a little help with that, which I think will make life less stressful and more enjoyable for all of us.

I'm not sure those are in the format Walsch is suggesting, but hopefully they will be seen as being in the proper spirit.

Walsch concludes his blog post by suggesting that Thanksgiving should be the holiest day of the year

. . . because gratitude is the most sacred tool in the Creator’s Toolbox. With it anything can be produced, anything can be created, anything can be experienced!

I am not a Biblical scholar or a theologian, but I suspect he may be on to something. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Be thankful. I am.

The Three Ages of Man

This is a topic I had considered writing about several weeks ago, prior to what could be termed my emotional meltdown. Somehow, with the onset of a new year and the reading I have been doing in the Conversations with God book series by Neale Donald Walsch, the time seems right to return to this notion and set down my thoughts.

First, let me say that I am not speaking of historical eras, such as the Industrial Age. No, the three ages of man that I am concerned with are internal components of each one of us. Those three ages are: emotional, intellectual, and physical. Together, the make up what could be termed our relative age.

In some respect, each of these ages are moving targets, and they are not always advancing upward, not even our physical age. For instance, how often have you heard someone say they feel like a kid again? Or, perhaps in the midst of an adrenaline rush, they are able to do something they had been unable to do for years.

For some of us, our physical age seems to advance exponentially rather than incrementally. I am 52, but there are days when I feel more like 72 due to occasional hip pain that extends into my knee. Stiffness in my back sometimes causes me to hobble around (at least until I am warmed up a bit) like someone much older.

With regard to intellectual age, how often have you said or heard someone else say "she's wise beyond her years" or "he has the mind of a child"? Then of course there is the child who is so brilliant mentally he or she is able to enter college at the age of 12 or 13. Physically and emotionally, this youngster is 12 or 13, but intellectually, he or she is 18 or 19 or even older.

Finally, there is the emotional age. Often, we hear about this age in a negative sense, such as when a parent admonishes a child for "acting like a two-year old." This age can also be impacted by trauma of some sort in the home, such as when a parent dies or when a child is excessively sheltered.

In my case, this is the age I have the most difficulty pinpointing. Because of my parent's divorce when I was five, followed by living in some fairly abusive relationships as a child accompanied by nearly complete withholding of human affection at times, my emotional age is nowhere near as advanced as my physical or intellectual age.

I often have trouble connecting with people or getting close to them for that matter. In fact, the closest friendship I currently have would likely have never developed if it had not been for e-mail. Face to face, I move much more slowly and defensively, to the point that most people don't take the time, and I don't blame them.

I also suspect that I can, at times, behave in a manner more befitting a 15-year old with a crush than a 52-year old adult. My emotional development has been stifled in some regards, so that it is sometimes difficult for me to know or to recognize when a line has been crossed and behavior begins to border on the inappropriate.

This is an issue I struggle with (as do many, I suspect) as I begin to get more accustomed to the simple idea of feeling and expressing feeling. The balance is not yet there, but with the help of friends, family, and professionals, it will come in time.

The Conversations with God books talk about the idea that there is really no such thing as time, that now is all there is. The implication in this is that each moment is made up of past, present, and future, and that they are in some ways interchangeable. When I think of the fluid nature of age when thought of in terms of the three ages I have discussed here, that whole notion seems to make much more sense.