I will be the first to tell you that I’ve made a lot of stupendously stupid choices in my life, so I am exceedingly grateful that, in spite of my youthful stupidity, my life has turned out surprisingly well. I have fantastic friends and a fabulous family, and while I am always glad to see them all happy and healthy, I am doubly so in this current moment. Too many people have been lost already.

But today, I want to take a little time to remember other things I am grateful for that are perhaps less serious in tone (but also, perhaps not). So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here are some of the other things I am grateful for:

• Words, and the pleasure that novel ideas can convey using them. For instance, this: “…reading a book on your own was figured as a conversation with the deceased, where you listen to the dead with your eyes.“ (emphasis mine) It’s from an excerpt from the book How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education by Scott L. Newstok, and now I want to read the rest of the book because it just sounds fascinating.
• Poetry, because I love it but I’m too tired right now to go into more details on why it’s important and everyone should read it, save to say that reading poetry is transformative. It forces you to see the world and everything in it in a new light, from a new perspective. Poetry, therefore, broadens the mind, as does all great literature.
• Allergy medicine, because spring has finally arrived and I am suffering for it.
• Caffeine, because without it, I would move slow enough to give sloths a run for their money. 😄

How about you – what are you grateful for?

(c) 2020. All rights reserved.