Yeah, But I Am Thankful

The main point of Thanksgiving, of course, is to express gratitude for the good things in our lives. And as I wrote last year, it should also be about showing gratitude for what is yet to come.

Some people genuinely believe that life is great, so they find it very easy to talk about the things they are thankful for. Depending on their religious or spiritual beliefs, they might thank God, the universe, or no one in particular.

Others find it more difficult because of their life situations, but they can still use the holiday as a time to try to look at their lives a little more positively. That’s good, of course, but once the turkey-dinner leftovers are gone, the holiday cheer has passed, and they have to drag themselves back to work on Monday or face the gauntlet of Christmas-shopping crowds in the malls, their grateful feelings fall prey to the “life sucks” virus.

Of course, there are also those who can’t find anything in their lives to be thankful for, not even for one day. It is sad to feel like that, but I suppose at least they are not hypocrites.

Four Perspectives

Most of us sort of go back and forth to one extent or another in how we feel about the “blessings” or “curses” in our lives. But when people look at or talk about their lives, it seems there are basically four options:

1) Everything is great and perfect – the unrealistic “rose-colored glasses” approach.

2) Everything is terrible and my life sucks – the “paint everything black,” gloom and doom approach.

3) There are a lot of good things, sure, but I do have a lot of problems, which I guess we could call the “glass is half empty” approach.

4) Yeah, I have some issues like everyone else, but there are plenty of positives that outweigh the problems, which I guess we’d have to all the “glass is half full” approach.

We can dismiss the first two immediately because life is never so absolute. Nothing is perfect, and nothing is completely terrible. We can try to alter our attitudes to attain those absolutes, but it’s almost impossible to keep the world around us from injecting a bit of the opposite side. We can come close to convincing ourselves that everything is perfect, and that even the bad things that come our way from time to time – the imperfect – are a form of “perfection.”

We can manifest the negative absolute in our lives more easily, it seems, than the positive. But even the dourest and dark-minded person cannot completely shut out those occasional rays of sunshine that try to bring them out of it. Little glints of light can still make their way into the gloom.

More common, and realistic, are those who focus on one side, either the negative or positive, but acknowledge that the other side exists and exerts influence. But which side do we focus on, the upbeat or the downcast? I think for most of us, it tends to fluctuate depending on what’s happening in our lives or how long we’ve been living one way or the other. I know that this is how it is for me.

I like to believe that I live in the upbeat world – focusing on the positive while acknowledging that problems exist – more often than in the other. This blog is testament that I have spent some time in each, but I think that even my darker posts usually end with a positive message. And so it is here.

The fact is that, while I do have some problems, disappointments and even regrets, the things I should be thankful for – the positives – far outweigh the negatives that I sometimes dwell on. In one of my earliest posts, written more than four years ago, I wrote that I was a lucky guy. And I still believe that.

Things are Pretty Darned Good

Last year I wrote about being thankful for what is yet to come. I just reread that post, and it still applies, so I won’t repeat it. I’ll just mention a few things in the “yeah, there are some bad things, but the good is much better” category.

Yeah, I have some aches and pains. My right knee has become a chronic problem, and I frequently get stiffness in my back and hip. 

But, I don’t have any really serious health issues (as far as I know), I can still go out and do 50 km or more on my bike, swim for 30 minutes straight, and do a solid hour or so on the weights. And the, ummm... “essential equipment” still works perfectly. So no real worries about health. That is something to be thankful for!

Sure, I have reasons to complain about work, particularly the mindless corporate bureaucracy that tends to deaden the joy of any creative endeavor. And I’d like to be making more money, of course. 

But money has never been my first priority, and I have definitely had much worse jobs with even worse bureaucracy. I love teaching English, and I know I am very good at it. I enjoy my students every day, and I am blessed to share an office with three fantastic colleagues. That is a lot to be thankful for.

OK, so I live in a small apartment in an old building, and sometimes it is cold in winter, and sometimes there are noisy people around me. 

But it is actually pretty comfortable most of the time, and I have lived in worse places. What’s more, I have it a lot better than many others here in Kharkiv and certainly better than probably the majority of people around the world. And I have had the experience of living in a pretty luxurious home in the Denver suburbs, as well as in a fantastic cabin in a mountain forest. Most people can hardly even dream of that. More good stuff to be thankful for.

It’s true that the city I’ve lived in for most of the past nine years – Kharkiv – is a post-Soviet town that has a lot of dreary looking buildings, poor infrastructure, and a corrupt government. 

But it has its good points too, like a lot of really good restaurants and fun places to go. What’s more, I have been able to travel from here to points in Europe that would have cost me an arm and a leg to visit from Colorado. And I can even think about traveling east to points in Asia or the Indian Ocean. I love travel and adventure, so that’s a lot to be thankful for.

The only true disappointment and regret in my life has been that I’ve had to live so much of it alone and without that one special person, a special love to shower me with light and warmth, and to receive that same light and warmth that I’ve been so ready to give. The person who I thought for decades was “the one” wasn't. And a couple of more recent hopes were just figments of my wishful thinking. 

But, I have some of the most amazing and special friends a man could ask for, both here in Ukraine and back in the States. Every day they add some measure of light and warmth that makes it all worthwhile. And even as the rapidly passing years seem to make finding that special love less and less likely, I still have hope that it’s not impossible. As long as I have such friends as I have, I definitely have a lot to be thankful for.

And to add a cherry to the top of this gratitude cake, I have two absolutely amazing and talented daughters whom I love dearly, and we have relationships that sometimes I feel are stronger than I deserve. They and their families give me a universe to be thankful for.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about coffee. I can drink coffee every day. Sometimes I can have it with Bailey’s. That is a cupful of delicious stuff to be thankful for.

Let’s see if I can remember all of this the next time I get a little down and start to think that things aren’t so great. In fact, things are really pretty darned good.

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The Post-Vacation Blues

After a phenomenal vacation that challenged my senses and emotions, I returned to Kharkiv. And my heart sank.

It wasn’t Kharkiv’s fault. The disappointment started, on a small scale, when we left Ponta Delgada, and it grew slowly as we made our way back to Ukraine over several days. It became palpable when we got to Kyiv. Just being in the arrival area of Boryspil Airport, after going through airports in places like Lisbon and Paris, was a bit of a letdown.

We spent about four hours trying to “rest” on lightly padded bench seats in a corner of the airport terminal that was brightly lit, noisy and cold. But even this was better than waiting around in the train station; Kyiv’s train station is awful, especially in the wee hours of the morning. It’s a place to be avoided.

And we mostly managed to do just that. After a 45-minute bus trip to the station, our wait for the train was mercifully short, and we were soon onboard. Still, the train was taking us on the last leg of the trip back to Kharkiv, and it was a little sad.

I truly felt that I was back in my dour reality on the taxi ride from the Kharkiv train station to my apartment just after noon that Saturday. The usual sights and sounds that have long been part of my everyday life were a stark reminder that my “Vacation of a Lifetime” had become a memory, more like a dream than anything tangible.  

At one point the taxi turned up Kosmicheskaya Street, passed one of my favorite restaurants, Trattoria, and then turned north on Nauka Avenue (formerly Lenin Avenue). That’s when it reality hit me like a brick to the head. I was riding up a street that I see multiple times every week and had traversed hundreds of times in the past, perhaps even more: the same shops and buildings, the same traffic, the same marshrutkas, the same badly parked cars, the same people on the street. More than anything else, this shouted that the vacation was over.

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In a day and a half, I would be back in my office doing the same things I did before, dealing with the same corporate bureaucracy, the same pressures, the same worries, the same lonliness – the same life.

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I was back in Kharkiv – back to the same small apartment in the same gray building, and all the same little things about my life here that made the two-week escape so wonderful. In a day and a half, I would be back in my office doing the same things I did before, dealing with the same corporate bureaucracy, the same pressures, the same worries, the same lonliness – the same life.

Vacations are supposed to give us a break from the stresses of our work and life and let us enjoy a different experience for a while so that we can come back with renewed energy. But often, after an especially good vacation, we come back to a reality that just seems to swallow up whatever good impressions and energy we might have gained. And that’s how I felt.

It’s About the Speed of Time

Maybe the problem is time and the speed at which it passes. During those early days of a vacation, when you are wide-eyed with your first wonderful impressions, you know you still have more great days ahead of you, and it’s all good. In the back of your mind you know it’s going to pass quickly, but you try not to think about it and just enjoy the moment. It’s joyous, and you feel at peace.

As the vacation winds down, you start to realize how quickly the time has just whizzed by, and it can start to take away a little of the luster. You know that it’s going to be over soon, and you’ll have to go back. You start to think about how quickly the time has passed, and you feel like you’ve been robbed.

And once you have returned, you look back in amazement at just how fast that wonderful time transformed from a present-moment reality to a wistful memory, something more like a dream. You have photos and mementos of your trip, but it’s not part of your reality any longer. Yep, time is a thief, and you've been robbed!

The irony of time is that it seems there is never an end to our humdrum, workaday lives. But special times, like great vacation trips, are over in the blink of an eye. I suppose this is related to the accelerated passing of time I first wrote about two years ago in a New Year post called, Life at the Speed of Time.

Beat the Blues – Plan Another Vacation

Seven weeks have passed since I got back to Kharkiv, and I am still in awe of those two wonderful weeks in Portugal. I think less now about feeling let down, and I genuinely cherish the memories. When my head is in the right place, as it usually is, those memories are a bulwark to help keep my everyday life from bringing me down. It works.

Maybe it was a mental reaction to counter the blues, but almost as soon as I was back, I started thinking about another vacation in the future. To add some spice to it, I have been imagining how I might create something even better than the Portugal trip.

I had a pretty nice, although short, vacation to northern Italy in January 2015, and in August of that year I went on an all-inclusive vacation in Turkey that was much better than the Italy trip. The vacation in Portugal FAR outshone the Turkey trip in every way possible, so it’s certainly possible to put together a new adventure that could even surpass this latest trip.

I’ve started thinking about Hawaii (especially Maui), or maybe going in the other direction to visit the Seychelles, Thailand, Nepal or Sri Lanka. It’s crossed my mind that I might like to return to an old haunt like Japan or Peru, and I’d certainly enjoy seeing more of Argentina than I did during my one short working trip to Patagonia. And, of course, I still have unfinished business in Ireland.

But so much hinges on what the future holds, and at the moment I have no clue. After almost a decade in Ukraine, it does seem as though the time to leave may finally be approaching, in which case, exotic (and expensive) trips don’t seem to make much sense when I would need to save as much cash as possible to relocate.

But I truly don’t know yet what I want to do, so I am still free to dream of hiking in the lush green hills of Maui, basking on a beach in the Indian Ocean, revisiting the land of the rising sun, or exploring Buenos Aires. And dreams are always good to have. They keep the post-vacation blues at bay.

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