Good morning, happy Monday, and Happy Thanksgiving!
“When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.”
– Tony Robbins
Thanksgiving is the 4th Thursday of November, so this year Thanksgiving is as late as it possibly can be (the 28th), which means the Christmas shopping season will be shortened a bit … a friendly reminder to my fellow procrastinators 😉
I love to take pictures, and I take a ton of them! I think this year I will take somewhere around 50,000 photos. As I’ve been scouring through photos from this year in preparing our family Christmas card, I was hit with how the moment captured within a photograph is often so wonderful, but the moments surrounding that photo are oftentimes far from it.
There are countless times when there is crying, complaining, fighting, and pouting leading up to the time the photo snap happens. Then the shutter opens and for a split second in time everyone is smiling or laughing, and all seems perfect. But, just as soon as that moment is over real life begins again, the yelling, fighting, and bickering.
We live in a Tik Tok, Instagram, X, Facebook world where we see pictures of others all the time. In the photos that are posted the smiles are radiant, the hair is perfect, the children appear so well behaved, and the background looks like amazing computer-generated images. But the reality surrounding that picture is very likely far from what that photo displays.
My friends, this is called real life and as messy as it is, it’s a beautiful thing.
To this day when looking at old pictures I’m reminded of the story surrounding the photo, a story that often involves embarrassment or even physical pain.
A classic family story from my childhood involves a vacation to the desert where my dad is stepping backwards and bending down to take a photo of the family, but he leans a bit too low and basically sits on a cactus. As my mom pulled out the cactus needles from his backside, I’m sure he was not thinking about how enjoyable a story this would be at a future Thanksgiving family gathering. 😉
This Thanksgiving, may I encourage all of us to embrace the mess, cherish the chaos, and take the time to realize the memories we are making will last a lifetime.
Enjoy the journey.
I think my thoughts can best be summarized by a quote from author LR Knost:
Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and the awful it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.
Happy Thanksgiving my friends!