What I Love About Life

It’s the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend (here in Canada), a cool, wet and grey day. While the temptation may have been strong to lollygag a little longer in bed this morning, or to pass the day parked on the sofa watching reruns of Murder, She Wrote, I decided to make the best of the day, despite its greyness. I made my coffee and wrote my Morning Pages. I read a couple of chapters from Julia Cameron’s The Sound of Paper, and then I set to work on my current work-in-progress. When I looked up at the clock, two hours had slipped by. It was a good writing session.

Certain holidays always get me thinking about life — where I am, where I’ve been, where I’m hoping to go. Thanksgiving has me thinking about where I am, and what really matters … to me! I’ve made no secret of my resistance to social media. While I have accounts with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, I don’t live vicariously through them. A look at any of my social media accounts will show that I’m not concerned about the number of followers I have, how many people like my Facebook page, or how many people I’m connected to on LinkedIn. What is important to me are the friends, steadfast and true, who are there for me when life is going well and not so well.

These friends I call my godsends.

I call them my godsends because, spread out across Canada and the United States, they are friends to me and to my artistic pursuits. They support me when life ripples with success and encourage me during more challenging times. The past few weeks have been a challenging time as I’ve had to, once again, deal head-on with my depression. When I felt completely lost, and uncertain as to how to proceed, my cell phone dinged. It was a text message my good friend Suzanne, who lives in the Northwest Territories, touching base. Then came the calls from Nova Scotia; my good friend Heather-Anne and her mother, Myrtle, checking in to see how I was doing. And in the mailbox was a card from Mary, in Ottawa, catching me up on her news and inquiring about my own.

 

Godsends are those people who reach out — without asking — when I need encouragement the most. That’s what I love about life, and what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend.