See calm ahead or around us now reflects on where we are looking and who is with us.............

Thoughts at Christmas? Peace be still. Calm can come. Faith. All good thoughts. I was visiting with a man who is about 87 earlier this week. He had taken a fall and was going to be in a nursing home for 2 or 3 months now that he was out of the hospital. His mood was positive and he was very alert. I asked him to recall his favorite Christmas and tell us why it was a favorite. He remembered being a kid in his parents home and the year he got a favorite dog for Christmas.

Maybe a Christmas that is often ignored when one asks someone to remember their "favorite" is the Christmas we are now having. An answer to what was your favorite time could or maybe should be "now".

This picture is an interesting one I think. The "now" for those in the boat might be very different based on where those in the boat were looking or what their eyes saw. The picture was a painted as a portrayal of Christ just before he calmed the weather and the sea. I wonder if you were one who had been in the boat if you would look back at this time in your later years as a "favorite time" or a time you would always remember? What is better, to get the dog you always wanted or to have the seas around you calmed. It takes some faith to see the seas calmed around us sometimes. Maybe that is what Christmas really is, a moment to look closer at how calm the seas around us really are or what we have come through or who stands in the boat ready to help.

What we see around us depends on what we seek in life.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees. - Marcel Proust

Lotayear.................

Year end is a good time to look back. This year pictures have been useful in capturing some of the changes. This is a lot of things that remind me of the year just passing.

looking for 23

I was out running today and didn't see this sign. Guess something might be coming up soon.

12 days until Christmas and a E Card

I am going to send this picture and this brief note out as a "Christmas Card" or really instead of a Christmas Card this year. Doing it by email will enable me to add a message and a specific note to those that I send it too. Over a lot of years we have noticed the "newsletters" that a variety of friends and family have sent each year and it has been interesting to find out what has been happening in their lives. From this picture you will be able to see a lot of what has been happening to "us" this year.

One of us took a lot of pictures. We went to the State Fair, visited family, family came and visited us. We took some interesting walks. I changed jobs to a large Fast Food chain.

It has been a very good year and one that has made us appreciate a lot of things.

Ho Ho Ho, No Tree, No Tree, No Tree

Yep, "No Christmas Tree for us this year". No lights on the tree. We had some older trees and last year we were planning on selling the house and in an effort to clear out some room we took a run to the local Goodwill industries. We found that they don't want old trees but nearby we found a dumpster that just seemed to be waiting for a couple of old trees so we dropped ours off. Well here we are a year later. No tree. Maybe by posting a Christmas miracle will happen and we might find one between now and the "big day".

Looking Out to Understand First.

Looking out the window to my left. Wondering about the day ahead. Thinking some about lunch. The question of how to recap the interesting events of the last week since the last blog is worth some thought. It has been about a week since I finished my book on "Sitting Bull". I realize that biographies hold my interest the best right now. Habit #5 in Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is "Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood". Maybe really "understanding" another person is the key. It certainly works as far as enabling me to find a book of interest these days. Covey's principal puts the need "to be understood" after understanding the "other". Fact might be that once you really understand the "other" the pressing need to be "understood" yourself may just be a lessor need. When I opened up this blog today I noticed my prior blog heading.........."Thankful for now". I am going to go back and change it to Thankful For, "Now". Seems like my title may not have been reading the way I intended it to. I have thought a lot about whether I am really most thankful for "now" since Thanksgiving Day. Yes, is what I come up with when I ponder this.