my thanks for you

Judi's call for the November Artsy Essay is here.

It is easy to think of thanks regarding certain folks.  Thanks for my mom laboring to birth me 37 years ago on a Monday afternoon in Pennsylvania came to mind when I called her the other day, having listened to her singing Happy Birthday on my voice-mail.  When she answered the phone, wishing me a happy birthday; I wished her a happy birthday right back.  After all, she was the one who did all the hard work and without her, I wouldn't be around today.

I have many thanks for folks like my guy, who has taught me love and acceptance by giving me these things freely and endlessly.  His encouragement and support has allowed me to change my life in ways that are ongoing and welcomed.  He is a man worth more than he recognizes.

Then there are those entities that are vague notions which embody a collective of concepts, like The Veteran who fought nobly and The Teacher who molded carefully and even The Student who taught me life lessons.  We all could and should acknowledge and give thanks to those folks more often than we do.  There is the ultimate in nebulous concepts:  god, the supreme being, the higher power, the universe.

When it comes to thanking that one person for one extraordinary thing that has mattered tremendously in my life, I'm stumped.  I thought of many folks in addition to my guy, my mother, my counselor, my friends, my gp, my mental health caregivers.  There are inventors, promoters, writers, readers, conversants.  The list easily scrolls out with a multitude of names, titles, positions; all folks, great and small, with whom I interact directly and indirectly.  With the notion of sixth degree, I could very well include everybody and anybody; living or dead, even those yet to be.

The truth is that while each person is special and a gift; so is it that no person is uniquely unequaled.  What I mean is that Nicolae Tesla has been an amazing man, but as we may or may not know, most of the kudos for ideas and inventions that he developed were given to others mostly because it isn't the conceiver who garners the glory so much as the one who manages the spread of the notion to the mass populations.  It is quite common that an idea is not arrived at by merely one person, but an idea whose time has come develops from other formerly conceived concepts that serve as current knowledge; so that many folks arrive to the same conclusion, the same points, the same idea, all but simultaneously.

All this to say that I can and do thank many, yes.  Throughout my entries over the years, I've thanked many, including folks whom have been inspirational to me in some way online.  And of course, there is you, the one who is reading this right now.

Thank you.