Healthful benefits of gratitude

We have all read the healthful benefits to our brains and bodies of taking the time to reflect on all we have for which to be grateful. I just filled a survey to that effect on our local news e-mail thread and I decided to do the same here: I coud go on too long, but I will modify myself. I am grateful for: being able to live to the ripe old age of 78, to have had good parents and a boom time in America in which to grow up, to have a healthy daughter who is happy and successful in her adult life, to have my siblings still alive and to be able to spend Thanksgiving with two of them, to have my own little bungalow which I love in a cozy and comfortable town with great neighbors, to live in AMERICA the wonderful, to have good friends who care about me and about whom I care, to have had a wonderful education and tools that allowed me to be a lifelong learner to have a satisfying and useful career that helped my fellow man. I am grateful that my ancestors took the big risk of leaving their homelands and coming to this great country, and I am grateful to have lived in the twentieth and twenty-first century to see such wonders in medicine and progress in society, despite the problems that people still struggle with in other parts of the world and in our own country - we are making progress! I am grateful for sufficiency i both my personal ife and in the place where I live - we mostly have all we need and we don't face famine or civil war or any of the plagues that beset outher parts of the world. I am grateful for the presidency of President Joe Biden who saved us from the chaos created by the previous administration. I am grateful to have lived in the period of the struggle for equality for women and to have benefited from that struggle. I am gratdful for my animal companions and the means to afford to keep and care for them. I am grateful to live in a property with trees and hollies and birds and other creatures. I am grateful for the ability to read and for the gifts I have been given to write and to paint and for the asssociations that allow me to share these gifts with others, local galleries, local journals, this blog! I am grateful to have lived in a period where we were challenged by evil but prevailed in two wars and two undeclared wars and I am grateful that my father and brother served in both and came home safely! I could go on but I think two of these long lists for one day is enough and I don't want to challenge the gods with too many gifts They say whom the Gods wish to punish they firwt give great gifts, but I never went in too much for ancient classical pessimism - especially the Greek form. Christianity offers much more hopeful optimism and less predestined doom! I am grateful for George Fox and the Society of Friends!

Happy Thanksgiving and I suggest you make a list too and surprise yourself!

By the way, I am grateful for my vegetarian life these many decades and how it has helped my health and I want to remind you there are many alternatives to meat eating for Thanksgiving.