Thankfulness

I have a friend and business associate who, on occasion, would look at me and say, "you know, you can make your mouth say anything." This would be in reference to an instance in which someone we had encountered, often times from a podium, had spoken eloquently or loudly or commercially, but not authentically. We knew it, we had been through enough trenches in our quest for economic equality as women in business at that time to almost instantly know fact from fiction, passion from "B.S.", and genuine promise from convenient words of the moment.

I found myself thinking about her declaration this week as this Thanksgiving Holiday was approaching. I thought about 'thankfulness' and all the places I was hearing it, but my spirit of discernment was having trouble with the sincerity of it. Are we really thankful or has thankful just become a buzz word, a feel good word, a slip through the cracks and dodge the truth word? Have we gone to the core of our existence to examine the quantity, quality, and consistency of the individual blessings that we experience moment by moment by moment? Or is the glib declarations of our thankfulness in reference to our acquisitions, our excesses, our greed, and our never ending self-focus?

I am forced to turn internal in search of my true thankfulness this season. I have had a year like no other, with highs and lows beyond my imagination. I've been stripped of illusion as it relates to who I am and what my life contains - a terrifying event because illusion is like cartilage, serving as a cushion between bone and reality - and I have grown in ways I didn't know I still could, or above all, still needed to. As hideously painful as coming to grips with my thankfulness has been I am eternally grateful to be coming into a place of understanding it.