As my wife and I were driving to an event, she asked me how I thought I had changed over the years.
“Gratitude,” I said, “ it’s almost an obsessive thought with me these days. I have no regrets. I used to hear older men say how much gratitude they felt. I didn’t understand, that of all they could have said, why they picked gratitude. Now I know.”
As I said that, another word came to mind. Courage. “More is behind me than in front of me, ” I said.
Continuing on in a softer voice, “sometimes I wake up and my day is free. Occasionally, I feel a bit melancholy. I think, what If I wake up some day and find myself alone without you? I would lapse into depression. My courage at that moment would fail me. Gratitude, I hope, would continue to weigh in.”
My wife stops me at that moment and says, “let’s make it twenty more years.”
We finally arrive at our event. “Cheri, I’ll get the eggs, buttermilk, and Haagen Dazs, and meet you at the check out.”
“Great,” she says. And with that we started the first activity of our next twenty years together.