Silent Night

To all those who, as I, will be spending Christmas Eve alone, choose joy and be grateful. Finding joy, isn't easy. It takes work. If we have no one, or family far away or are  simply among the forgotten, we should know that we are not alone. There are millions of us just like you and I. We are in company! We can either moan about our situations or we can choose the opposite. I sat, the other night thinking about having to be alone on this special evening for the first time in my life. I began to indulge in feeling sorry for myself. It's not something I do often. Then I remembered that I was only wasting time and that, at my age, there's precious little of it left. Did I really want to use up an hour, or even a minute, doing that? I started to use a little tactic that always takes me out of a quandary; I began, in my mind, to list all the good things I have and have had. Everyone has a list, and each one is different. For some, it's position or things, for others, it might be a place or an album of memories to dwell upon, for many it's people in their lives, past and present. We all have these "possessions" to thought-indulge in occasionally. Here we are, we single, alone, individuals, who are alive and know what and who we are, and we have the most precious thing that anyone could possess.  Life. We can go on and be blaming our circumstances on someone or something else or that our status is unfair or make comparisons between ourselves and others we think are more fortunate than us. Even if our fate didn't work out the way we had hoped, we are here, we exist. We all have ourselves and the beauty of our thinking and feeling minds and imaginations and our dreams and our hopes. These very personal gifts  can't be taken away. Some might say, you can talk, or you, or you, or you; but it isn't a contest. We can't compare ourselves with anyone else and be fair. We aren't all winners in life, but that's life as "they" say.  Happy Christmas Eve dear alone friends, how lovely to have your company, and may your new year yield at least a few of your dreams.