I just spent a delightful Thanksgiving with a combination of old friends and new acquaintances. It was like spending time with an adopted family since my blood and by-marriage families were scattered here and there. My mother likes to say”Good friends are the family you choose.” I agree with this. Some of my dear friends are family to me.
At our Thanksgiving meal we were not a group to hold hands, say prayers, take time to talk about what we are thankful for, or embrace any spiritual traditions. Instead, we dove into our meal with gustatory pleasure, toasted each other and to life with great wine and shared alot of laughs.
Yet, as I spent the weekend talking with my friends, both old and new, who shared their stories with me, I realized how quietly grateful we all must be. Four of us had faced medical scares, from multiple and serious surgeries to cancer. At least two of us had lost loved ones in the last two years. Others faced personal challenges or were in the middle of making life and career changes. We all could have looked back and dwelled on what had been or what could have been, but this was a hearty group of individuals clearly focused on living in the moment and moving forward.
At a conference were I spoke to women about reinventing their lives, I told them this:
When you face a challenge in your life, here is what you need to say to yourself:
“You can give up and get out. Or you can get up and go forward. But you cannot go back.”
For me Thanksgiving is being grateful to know that every day offers a new chance for me to move forward.
For me Thanksgiving is being grateful for having the faculties, the strength and the options to live life on my terms and not someone else’s.
For me Thanksgiving is being grateful that I have the freedom to make choices in my life as a woman when there are women in the world who do not have that option.
The word “forward” is powerful. It means advancing, moving to the front. It’s a battle cry and a bold move for bold people. But for regular people who live day to day it means getting up, getting dressed, facing the present and looking to the future with no regrets and no illusions that you can retrace your steps and go back to the way things were in their exactness.
There is also another powerful use of word “forward” that I feel defines the second half of the word Thanksgiving – “giving.” That is the phrase “pay it forward.” It means this: If someone does something nice for you, don’t just focus on paying them back. Think about paying it forward and do something nice for someone else. The original concept was popularized in a book-come-movie called “Pay It Forward” by Catherine Ryan Hyde.
This season, with so many people strapped for cash, with credit tight and with smaller paychecks, maybe we should all think more about paying less for material gifts and think more about paying it forward with random acts of kindness, small contributions and sharing experiences. It costs relatively nothing and it means everything in terms of making someone smile. Paying it forward does not have to be a big bold move. You don’t have to set out and try and change the world. But you can make a difference for an individual or a community.
We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.- Sir Winston Churchill.
In 2012 I am buying into paying it forward. How about you?
