For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:

What am I thankful for today?

“Possibilities.”

One thing about getting older, something I’ve observed in older relatives and friends, is the tendencies to let oneself be governed by notions of “can’t” or other habitual limitations. It’s true that it can be better for one to learn from previous bad experiences and not make the same mistakes over and over again, but if the net result is continually narrowing ones efforts because of said previous bad experiences, if one lives long enough, one may find themselves fearful to get out of the bed in the morning, much less doing anything else in life.

So, while I’d rather not repeat previous acts of stupidity, I appreciate the drive to face each day as a new opportunity to experience and learn from. Basically, six months into my retirement, all efforts to secure traditional gainful employment failed, I’m really thinking that I have to adjust to not having to go somewhere or report in to someone for the purposes of earning a wage. Twenty-eight years as an educator and 15-years as telco employee is enough for me to claim my pension that I spent 43-years accumulating. Things might be smoother had I made some effort to set aside funds on my own, a bit too late to learn that lesson… but thank God FDR realized almost 100-years ago that it does no one any good to have generations of workers too old to work end up at the end of their work lives living in poverty. So, how then do i manage my bag of beans and what was left to me from my folk’s efforts?

As a student at Pepperdine and as a professor at Full Sail University I used a book in my courses called The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander, that talked a lot about the influence ones state of mind has in the outcomes one might experience. I got a lot of push back from some students because, to them, it felt too much like New Age Woo. And there was definitely those who looked at the book at a cursory level as more “believing stuff into existence” crap. My approach was more in the vein that actions begin with thought and specifically that “good things” more often are the result of creative thought followed by focused effort than random hopefulness. The inverse is also at play, in that if one sees only danger and to risk of loss, then one is unlikely to move forward and more likely to experience some form of loss.

I remember I had one Full Sail student, an elementary public school teacher, who was the sole breadwinner of her family and she didn’t feel like she was in the position of risking her job by asking her employers for improvements in the work environment. For her, the ability to make risks for better were out of reach because she had nothing else to fall back on, should her supervisors say “No.” That is the hard part for many to see who read books like Art of Possibility, if they’ve never really lived at a hand-to-mouth level, that it’s hard to conceive of the benefit of dreaming of more when one is fearful of having less. I get that. I’ve lived much of my working life that way, not necessarily seeing the bigger picture, even though time after time I kept jumping from one job opportunity to another. I recently looked at the school website of the first school I taught at 28-years ago and I was a bit shocked to see how many of my fellow teachers whom I began teaching with were still there and showing no signs of leaving. I’ve taught at six schools since leaving Furgeson Elementary. Alas, my working class hand-to-mouth upbringing still makes me think in terms of the hourly/monthly wage and at possibilities beyond that.

So, I’m thankful right now that I still have opportunities or possibilities in my life. I hope that you can still look at each day for its possibilities that it might have in store for you.

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