The Imperative- R and R and R and...

The Imperative- R and R and R and...

It's exciting to most of us that our employer values our need to take a significant amount of time off for this holiday break. It's nice that the institution will also be closed during that time- allowing most of us to fully leave it behind for a period. Of course, many aspects of the holiday can be daunting with all of the busyness, heightened expectations, over-wrought family gatherings and potential for emotional overload. But, we must all feel called to take some time to just chill.the.heck.out! We must rest and relax our bodies and minds. Reflect on another amazing year full of opportunities and challenges- met and missed. Rejoice in our many successes and a chance to retry next year if we failed. Record all of those thoughts and look back on them next New Year's. Ready ourselves for even greater challenges in the year to come. May you take some time this holiday to take advantage of all of the R and R imperatives.

The Season of Gratitude

12/1/14 The Season of Gratitude

 

We call the time around Thanksgiving and through the New Year “The Holidays.” Personally, I am glad that we start our holiday festivities with Thanksgiving of the bounty of the year’s labor and we end them looking forward to a new year. Without commenting on any of the less savory aspects of the origin of the Thanksgiving feast, I am thinking more about the symbolism it can have for us today. As I think about the spirits of thanksgiving and gratitude, I am struck that they are grounded in the present and the future, not in the past.  As Neal A. Maxwell said, “We should certainly count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.” Certainly, in being thankful, we are thinking of the conditions that took place (past tense) but we are expressing thanks in real-time today and creating a condition of the mind that is moving us into the future at that very second.

 

Living in the nation we do, in the age we do, with the jobs and health insurance we have, surrounded by people who care for us, with the resources we have at our fingertips, we have many reasons to be thankful. Maybe our challenge is to be thankful at this specific moment, and to move forward living gratefully by intentionally becoming a blessing to someone else. I can think of no better or no more future focused way of living because we know that making a difference for others pays dividends into the future. Cicero summarized it well, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”  Will our choice to live gratefully have a serious impact on the future? It certainly can’t hurt.