fbpx

A New Year’s Resolution: Gratitude!

[additional-authors]
December 30, 2014

“You are as close to 76 as you are to 16!” 

Bill loves to sting me with his wit, as if looking at my children, walking past a mirror, and the occasional lapse of memory were not enough.  Honestly, 46 is not as terrible as I thought it would be.  I used to laugh at the thirty-something year old guys hitting on the twenty-something year old girls at the singles events, but I’ve sort of become happily invisible in those scenes. 

This year scares me more than others, not with the fear of failure or the unknown, but with a question few of us are honest to ask: “Is my light dimming?”

There is always a deep core of failure within me.  That’s partially what drives me.  I know my limits.  I know what is excellent and how far I live from that zip code.  I will never run the three minute mile.  I will never find the cure for cancer.  I will never play the violin, even at a fraction of what my ears reveal to me in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  I may never write anything of significance, much less a masterpiece. 

But my biggest fear is that I may not matter.

Sure, I’m important to my family and a few close friends, but the world will spin just fine without me.

In that truth, there is both pain and liberation.

I hang on to those moments that take my breath away.  I am more than ever entrenched in awe.  Each shade of purple behind the clouds, each chirp of a morning bird, every recovery of a hopeless patient, every look of surprise in my son’s eyes- those are moments of eternity for me.

And the object of a secular New Year- midway to my beloved Rosh Hashanah- becomes to grow a new set of feet that take me down a different path, to shed my skin like a snake and become more vulnerable to life’s temperament, to ask my heart to find more reasons to beat, to grow eyes that can see beyond the known, past the tangible.

With a fresh start, I look back to count my blessings which in retrospect were tiny breadcrumbs carefully placed for me to find today, and I look into the future to do things a little better than my previous short attempts.  I wish to slow time so that the taste of its nectar lingers a bit more, to create a tiny window where doors slammed shut, and to have faith that the best is yet to come.

I know.  One day, miracles will be the rule again.  Every parent's wish will come true that “my children will be better than me.”

If God has faith enough to awaken me to this wondrous garden each morn, and if the flower teaches herself to bloom in colors after the long winter's freeze, then I too shall thaw the shell around my soul and sing a song of praise, anew.

Because You exist, I write.  Because of You, I love.  In giving thanks, I will always matter.

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

Losing One’s True North

Normally we say goodbye to our loved ones, as they fly back to their normal lives, but what is normal about the lives they fly back to at this moment in time?

Peter Beinart’s Rapture

Instead of correcting some of the hyperbolic anti-Israel “reporting” that has so blurred people’s capacity to know what is going on, he pours fuel on the flames of ignorance and perpetuates a rhetoric that lays blame for the whole conflict primarily or solely on Israel.

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.