WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - Reflections on 2025

• I am grateful to still be alive. Last years HA! made a slow, but perceptible, shift in my views on life and what its for. As 2025 has progressed, I've felt encouraged to make the most of life, certainly, but that doesn't mean becoming excessively busy, I've found a particular peace in allowing the quality of what I do, and how I choose to execute it, motivate me, rather than a list of achievements, and tasks completed. Yes, I still have my creative projects, but they are not quite the central most important thing I do, they are just one thing I enjoy doing. I've come to realise that we all leave unfinished projects behind when we die, that's how it is. So, no need to hurry.
  
  
• I could have survived the HA! but with my mind and body impaired in some way, making life difficult not just for me. but also for my husband. I feel gratitude every day that I can go out for a walk, breath the air, feel more deeply connected to nature and the world. I still have my awareness, a fully functioning consciousness, that can find pleasure and enjoyment in even the most simple of sensations. That I still have my independence, my ability to reflect on my experience, it's a tremendous gift. For if you're unable to express your appreciation of your life, where can the gratefulness, where can the love come from? 
  
  
• To love and to be loved in return is a precious commodity not to be wasted. And I've realised with greater cogency this year that the ability to love, lies at the core of feeling grateful. I lived a good deal of my early adulthood, craving to be loved and not finding it. And this had an ungrateful corroding effect upon my world view, there was an underlying bitterness, a consequent souring in any potential for gratitude. This changed in mid life when I first met my husband. Our life living together now, can feel such an easy going one, it can also be easy to forget that this has taken effort to get to, and still takes effort for love to be expressed and not to take anything for granted. I love my husband more now than I ever have. Such a clever, creative, loving, caring and considerate man, that I'm so grateful to have this one opportunity to share a life with him.
  
  
• I was sipping a breakfast cup of rose tea, a favourite morning drink. For just one fleeting moment I had this rush of pleasure, of feeling so grateful for this drink I was imbibing. The warmth, the aroma, its flavour, the sensation of comfort and reassurance. So often I am eating and drinking on automatic, I'm feeding my hunger, but not really fully present to the sensations and pleasures of it.  Much of what is missing from life, comes down to these small fine details of life. What I am unaware of, I cannot appreciate, what I fail to appreciate I cannot feel grateful for, and hence cannot value or love.

• In the West we take so much for granted. Recent years have shown just how subject to abrupt change, how vulnerable to the unexpected we all are. And it is in moments like these where we can see more clearly, the things that we treasure, and feel gratitude for what we already have. This is still a favourable time we are currently living within, and I'm grateful for that. If you are gay in this country you have been given more rights now than we've ever had previously, We are all broadly still able to live our life however we wish, without state oppression or harassment or violence.
  
  This zeitgeist is of course subject to change, their are premonitions of that already emerging, the potential for a reversal of our current tolerant progressive approach. Whatever has been given can be taken away. Tolerance, unfortunately, is conditional. Express your gratitude for what you already have, and one way of expressing the depth of that gratitude, our love for it, is by being prepared to defend it. Gratitude is an appreciative proactive love.