Getting Personal

I';ve had a pretty good ride ... 3 middle-aged children and 6 grandchildren. One of my kids and spouse lead a very religiously ritualistic life and work very hard. They and their kids are healthy. One eschews all religion and lives a comfortable and healthy life with spouse and child. They participate in rituals when the family partakes. The remaining child has three kids and a spouse and fall somewhere in the middle though serious health issues follow their family in a yet-to-be-diagnosed illness. DH Lawrence wrote a wonderful short story (The Rocking Horse Winner ... introduced to me by Marsha some 40 years ago) about a youngster who feels with all his body and his soul that he must redeem his family -- most obviously his Mother -- from its luckless state of needing more money. He rides himself on his Rocking Horse to an early death, though his luck won out monetarily.

In almost all our years together, Marsha and I have lived a blessed life. LOTS OF GOOD STUFF HAPPENED. Hey! Just the three kids and their spouses and their six kids would be enough. The fact that they welcome us to join their pilgrimages ... their unfolding lives ... would be enough. But we've also always earned a living and (to borrow a curse from Car 54 Where Are You?) our teeth haven't fallen out on the day before Thanksgiving. Professionally we've been OK. Never knocked the World dead but always wanting for nothing important. Even our health has been somewhere in the middle of the normal curve.

I work a great deal with people who come to me with personally constructed religions that require that they avoid most pleasures and demand of themselves the performance of painful or humiliating activities. This appears to consistently (I have been working with such sufferers for nearly 40 years) go with a difficulty appreciating ... a difficulty experiencing gratitude. Often, this is accompanied by a toxic envy, one that begrudges others their fortunes and bemoans their own misfortunes. Envy comes in two forms ... with the other living comfortably with gratitude ...

In our dotage, this is essential, as we see the next generations strutting their stuff and their stuffs and the still-to-be-filled canvas that they have many years to fill.

Blessing for us Old Ships going out to our Seas each day: May we beneficently envy the young just as we rejoice in our mostly filled lives and already made choices!