A Return to Gratitude
- November 14th, 2015
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From time to time I like to pause, reflect, and be grateful. This morning’s thoughts have been brought to the forefront by yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Paris. It saddens me that things like this still happen in 2015. It doesn’t surprise me though, every living thing on this earth has fought for itself since time began. People fight every day, that’s not going to change any time soon. What does bother me is a lack of compassion, recognition, and even acceptance of views that may not match one’s own. Everybody is carrying something with them through life, it’s so much better when one can occasionally share the load with others. Working together makes the burden less onerous.
It has been almost a year since I got out of the hospital. So much has happened, so fast. And so good. I am grateful to be alive and doing better than I probably ever have before, and it blows me away when I think about it. I am living an actualized, intentional life.
I am grateful for my family and friends, who have supported me through my trials and tribulations. My immediate family has really been amazing, thank you all. I love you. I am grateful to be reconnecting with my son after a prolonged absence at such a critical stage in his life. We went to the Avs game last week – thanks to tickets from my boss – and had a great time just hanging out. We work out together when his schedule allows it. His life has gotten exponentially busier, balancing school and a part-time job, and I am grateful for every minute I get to spend with him. My friends (that means you 🙂 ) have been there for me the whole way. Every “like”, every post, every share, connects us and sometimes gives just the right amount of support at the exact right time. I appreciate every one of you. Thank you for being my friend.
I am grateful to have the love of the most amazing woman I have ever met. We.are.the.same. Words can’t convey how special and important she is to me. We text every day and talk every night, for almost two years now. Every day. The only thing that would make it any better was if we lived closer to each other. We are both going through major life changes and the distance may actually be helping us grow closer. Each of us are strong enough that we would have navigated our personal shifts on our own, but to have the love, support, caring, and understanding of another who is going through a similar transition at the same time makes it so much easier. I wouldn’t be lost without you, my love, but I wouldn’t want to be without you either. Thank you for being such an amazing force and for sharing your life with me.
I am grateful to have a job that I love at a company that is just awesome. Everybody at Cliintel walks the talk and it’s fantastic to be surrounded by such a great group of people. It has the spirit of a startup with the security of an established corporation – exactly what I was looking for in a company. I’ve been with them for six months now, and am looking to expand my role into something more executive/strategic, and they’re fully supportive of that. In the meantime, I get to keep coming up with new ideas, doing analyses, writing killer code, and even creating the occasional stylin’ graphic or video. Good stuff!
I am grateful to be making new friends. As we move along in life, making new friends becomes more difficult than it was back in our school days. Work and family take up most of our time and unless we make the specific effort to get out, expand our boundaries, and meet new people, our circle of friends will shrivel up over time. There are those who have had the same friends their whole lives, from preschool to present day. I moved around too much as a kid to have those type of friends, but my Lexington friends are my oldest, and it’s been great to keep in touch with them over the years. I am glad that Tom has lived in the same town his whole life, and has that consistency. I also know people who stopped making friends after college. They’re satisfied with the friendships they have, and aren’t looking for anything new. I don’t quite get that. Perhaps a result of having a fixed mindset? I love meeting interesting people and my poker play has expanded my circle of friends substantially the past six months. We all love playing poker competitively, but there is a strong undercurrent of intelligence and supportiveness as well, at least in league play. We’re all trying to beat each other, but we’re all rooting for each other to do well too. Just a wee bit worse than ourselves. 🙂 I’ve made 20 new friends in my main poker league, with two or three having the potential to expand beyond the felt. In Dutch Boyd’s Twitch stream and poker league (Both are free, btw. We’d love to have you if you’d like to play), I am making a bunch more friends, notably including Dutch himself, and again it is a great, supportive environment.
I am grateful for my health. I’m slowly weaning off my meds for a variety of reasons, not least among is that they’re the wrong meds for bipolar and too low a dose to be clinically effective anyway. (Wait, a state-run institution got something wrong?? Say it isn’t so!) I remain sign- and symptom-free, for three and a half years now. I started TRT three weeks ago and am back in the gym every day. I’m starting to see results. I’ve gained 10 pounds in the last month and dropped four percent body fat. I figure most of that weight is just water, and frankly I don’t care about the body weight gain, just the fat loss. I am getting stronger, bigger in the right places. I can’t really feel the effects of TRT yet, but I am getting some physiological changes that suggest it’s starting to work. It’s funny, for some illogical reason I was expecting a more immediate response. But of course, treatments take time to produce results. Dammit, I want results NOW!
It’s an interesting thing, rebuilding my self and my life. I’m sure part of it comes from increased maturity, but I think more of it comes from intentionality. I had a long time in the hospital to figure out what I want from life, and I am no longer willing to sit back and wait for things to come to me. I finally realized that nobody is going to give me a thing. I was not born into privilege, I have had to work for everything I’ve achieved. And that’s where the satisfaction comes in. It’s rarely easy. In fact, the hard is what makes it good. I tend to minimize my efforts in hindsight, downplay how hard I’ve worked to achieve something. In reality, I’ve been working hard my whole life, and really feel that it’s all coming together now. Finally paying off. With that comes a twinge of fear, perhaps, that it will all go away, be taken from me by some force outside of my control. I accept that no thing is permanent – it will all change, again, at some point. Growth is, by it’s very nature, a painful process. But when we stop growing, we stop living. Just one year ago, I couldn’t allow myself to dream of the life I have now. Now that I have made it this far, I am taking this moment to acknowledge it and express my gratitude for it.
If this much was possible in the past year, who knows where I’ll be a year from now? I am ready for whatever comes, and am looking forward to continuing the adventure. Bring it! 😀
