Too Many Blessings, Too Little Appreciation

This is the time of the year, as the daylight grows shorter, temperatures dip and even the slightest breeze adds a crispness to the air, that many of us grow more introspective most especially as we watch the pages on the calendar signal that the start of another year is growing closer.

As has been so often the case for us in recent years and memory, the pause for the holiday season, seems to come at a ‘just in time’ moment as we take stock and recharge our emotional batteries.

Meanwhile, across our country, those struggling to make a better life for themselves, their families, and their communities have as long a road ahead of them as they did a year ago. Progress, such as it is, sometimes seems to be more in the eye of the beholder rather than milestones on the way to a safe harbor of dignity and safety.

When many of us, sadly not all of us, gather on Thursday to celebrate ourselves, one another, and the stories of our histories, we should resolve to use this holiday season to begin to remake the world in which we all live into a better place. And not just for the hungry, the hurting, the homeless, or the hopeless but for all of us.

We cannot do everything, but each of us can do something and when you add together all of our somethings, what we will have accomplished is greater than the sum of each individual together.

Not everyone will be able to celebrate, beginning with the men and women of our armed forces serving in places and situations neither of us have ever heard of, in defense of a way of life we too often take for granted. Remember, too, cops on the corner, emergency response teams, and all those assigned to 'holiday staffing’ duty or readying for "Black Friday" sales mania.

I didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but I have seen a lot of John Wayne movies, Pilgrim, and unlike the original Thanksgiving, it's not the food or the calendar that makes a holiday. It's the people with whom we share it.

Some of us will spend part of the day counting our blessings and pining over what we don't have. That inventory and regret make us who we are as a species, but perhaps in the 2,592,000 seconds between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, we can spend one of them being grateful for all that we have. 

-bill kenny

Too Many Blessings

Thanksgiving Day, 2016, United States of America

Well, a lot of things have happened
 Since the last time we spoke
 Some of them are funny
 Some of them ain't no joke.

 And I trust you will forgive me
 If I lay it on the line
 I always thought you were a friend of mine.

 And sometimes I think about you
 I wonder how you're doing, now
 And what you're going through.

 'Cause the last time I saw you, we were playing with fire
 We were loaded with passion and a burning desire
 For every breath, for every day of living
 And this is my thanksgiving.

 Now, the trouble with you and me, my friend
 Is the trouble with this nation
 Too many blessings, too little appreciation.

 And I know that kind of notion, well, it just ain't cool
 So send me back to Sunday school
 Because I'm tired of waiting for reason to arrive
 And it's too long we've been living these unexamined lives.

 'Cause I've got great expectations, I've got family and friends
 I've got satisfying work, I've got a back that bends

 For every breath, for every day of living
 This is my thanksgiving

 And have you noticed that an angry man
 Can only get so far?
 Until he reconciles the way he thinks things ought to be
 With the way things are.

 Here in this fragmented world, I still believe
 In learning how to give love, how to receive it
 And I would not be among those who abuse this privilege
 Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge.

 And I don't mind saying that I, I still love it all
 I wallowed in the springtime
 Now, I'm welcoming the fall.

 For every moment of joy, every hour of fear
 For every winding road that brought me here
 For every breath, for every day of living
 This is My Thanksgiving.

 For everyone who helped me start
 And for everything that broke my heart
 For every breath, for every day of living
 This is My Thanksgiving.

-Don Henley

-bill kenny