I’ve got so much to be thankful for this year. And it’s the first time since the pandemic began that I’ve felt optimistic about where I’m going with my life. Even if I’m a bit of a doomer, I remain a believer in the human capacity to figure shit out. The road to tomorrow is long and bumpy so best plan ahead.
I’ve had a certain worldview for a while. That we may have some hard years ahead of us to earn back the heights of our boom. Nothing in life is free. And we dined out on energy and resources that had hard costs.
But I prepared for the possibility that life might be harder. I got us to our homestead in Montana this year. To think before this year we’d never owned a piece of property before. It just wasn’t a possibility for so long and then we bounded up on the flush years and found a way to realize some gains.
So I’m grateful that on this cycle of the churn I’ve played it well and fair and I’ve set my family up to work and thrive during hard times. We didn’t get over our skis but neither did we fail to prosper. And for that I am grateful. I am thankful to have been able to play to higher standards but also not gotten eaten by the bigger beasts of capitalism.
I suppose it’s also no accident that I’ve also felt I’ve been thriving in my personal life. I’m so thankful to have made progress on becoming more myself this year. It will probably in hindsight be a demarcation between some of the compromises I made in my youth and some of the boundaries that have led to maturity now.
The more I let go of old copping mechanisms and become more myself, the better I do at achieving my goals. And I hope I can remember this lesson every day. If I can do that I will always have something to be grateful for in my life. And on this turn of the wheels I am offered another chance to defy the odds.