Gratitudesday: Friends

I spent most of today in a sour mood.  When I wasn't frantically trying to finish a book for class tomorrow, I was re-numbering the art in one of our manuscripts for the third time.  I try not to compare myself to others, because I really believe we're all on our own journey, but today, it felt like everyone I knew was doing something more amazing than me.

Here's a brief sampling of people I know were doing today:

• getting published in the New Yorker
• buying houses
• being teachers
• booking fabulous trips to far-off lands
• getting married
• seeing the Aurora Borealis in my hometown*

And while I was sitting there, making sure that the numbering of 234 images was consistent between six separate documents (that's checking that I used a dash instead of a period, and that I've labeled it as "photo" and not "figure" a total of 1,404 times), I was having a really impossible time not feeling jealous.  I was really happy for everyone, but I was also disappointed that nothing even vaguely exciting was happening in my life.  It was not my most attractive moment.

But, when I came home, I used my food processor to slice cabbage, and it worked really well.  Then, Roger discovered the ice cream I'd hidden in the freezer for him, and was way more excited than I was expecting.  And then, I finally finished the book, and when I moved on to find a poem for workshop tomorrow, I realized I've actually written much more than I'd thought this month.  And being out of my headspace for just a few hours has made me realize that even without anything enormous and interesting coming up, I'm still having a pretty great time, and a big part of that is being surrounded by the incredible people who surround me.  I don't think my life would be half so interesting if it weren't for all these people doing such fascinating things, and I'm grateful to have them in my life, reminding me of how many new things there are left to try.

*Okay, I'm still jealous of this one.  But, Angela informs me that it should keep going throughout the next few weeks, so hopefully I'll manage to get up there during one.  Because I have wanted to see the northern lights since I was in second grade, and our trip to Iceland in January, prime northern lights time, didn't yield very good results, due to heavy cloud cover.