Aquarius

Thanksgiving Week has arrived!

My house is hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year for the first time in years. A family member asked if we had enough silverware, so I rounded up all I could find, and we’re pretty close. I mean, we might make it. So this morning I looked online for more and I rediscovered that my set is called Aquarius. (I like it because the salad fork looks like a trident. It’s a symbol of power and reminds me of the ocean, but ultimately, it just looks so cool. Some people have awesome clothes or shoes. I have an awesome salad fork.)

The silverware search got me singing “Age of Aquarius” all day, and since I really only know the title words, I’ve been on a quick loop. After a few hours of this I decided to look up the Age of Aquarius—not the song or the lyrics, though I should have, but the age itself.  Among other things (technology, social advances), the Internet says this is a period of time where people are searching for deeper meaning. Now we’re speaking my language. And it’s happening now. Today. Currently. The time is now.

And speaking of time—follow me on this--I recently saw a meme that suggested we change the way we look at time. Instead of thinking about time as passing, the meme suggested we should think about time as arriving. It’s a small shift in thinking but it makes a huge difference. We go from things are “passing us by” to things are “just getting here,” for us.

So, yes, we could look at the world this week and focus on all that’s changed, gone, and all that we have lost along the way. But this holiday is about being thankful. So let’s make a small shift in our thinking and focus on all that we have and on all who got us here. Sure, there are those who held on too tightly and those who threw us out into the cold. But there are still others who calmly held our hand in the darkness and shone a light to lead the way. To get where we are, none of us took the Easy Road. And those of us who think we had nothing but the Hard Road available to us are likely not seeing the tiny lamps set out every so often, guiding our path.

Regardless of how we got here, I don’t think it’s mere happenstance that we’re all here together, journeying for deeper meaning, through time, looking for lamps, carrying our tridents. We are thoughtful; we are willing to shift our gaze; we are powerful. And we can stare down this Thanksgiving week with gratitude, joy, and maybe even enough silverware to go around.