Politics and Gratitude and The Damn To Do List

After we've been alive for a while we are who we are.  We can always change but the change becomes more incremental and more difficult.  A lot of the time I end my day feeling like I've fallen short, that I haven't checked off all of the things on my To Do List, some of which have been on the list for months and years, like dinosaur bones.  No one is going to complete that 3rd Century Roman aqueduct.  I can take "Finish Aqueduct" off of my To Do List.  It is what it is.  We don't do something else because we don't want to do something else - we want to do what we're doing.  Hopefully, there's some peace to be found in that.  And hopefully we push through that and accomplish the hard, new things that we don't want to tackle.  There's some peace in that, too.

The pandemic reminds me sometimes of all the things that I used to be able to easily do but now can't, things I took for granted and things I didn't take for granted, things that I deeply enjoyed and now miss.  I have to redouble my efforts to appreciate all the things I have in my life.  I have a Gratitude List that I review mentally each morning but still have a tendency to forget to be grateful, which makes me ungrateful to varying degrees.  Reminds me of the time I had a really nasty flu/respiratory infection and was sick for a number of weeks, coughing, coughing, coughing all the time, not sleeping with all of the coughing.  When I finally recovered I was so happy to just not start coughing as soon as I lay down to sleep that it made me realize how I took my health - my excellent health - for granted.  THAT is on the top of my Gratitude List every day.

I'm a little worried about politics and Alcoholics Anonymous right now.  This whole mask thing - incomprehensibly - is seeming to evolve into an issue of your political views instead of a public health issue.  We have a few meetings open for in person fellowship and they're militantly right-wing.  I don't care about your politics.   I have friends who have much different political views that me and I get along with them just fine . . . as long as we don't discuss politics.  I hope we don't shred some of our apolitical comity.