Fortunate, lucky, delightful and content New Year

-

 

I'm sitting in my recliner here on January 1, 2022 and wondering if there are synonyms for happy that I could use to express that wish in a more appropriate way. Word suggests glad, fortunate, lucky, delightful, content and so from that list I pick and say, Fortunate, lucky, delightful and content New Year to you all. You and we deserve at least a taste of it after 2021, don't we?

And are the admonitions of the sages enough to keep our keels even should 2022 be a carbon copy? Keep your chin up? Look on the bright side? In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight? Take heart by remembering that many are experiencing the same afflictions you are … minus food and shelter from the cold?

Agnes and I could complain without ceasing. For me, it's been a year and two months now since a complicated pneumonia put me in hospital, and the aftermath for my breathing is worrisome, plus a stupid act on my part did my back a nasty number and turned my posture from an exclamation mark to a question mark. (This metaphor works on so many levels, eh?)  

For Agnes, it's been coming to grips with profound hearing loss and the frustration of being in company without knowing what's being said, plus consternation with hearing aids that either don't work or work badly. And, of course, aging generally and the requirement of all humans that they taste at least a modicum of arthritis before their heavenly rest … hasn't forgotten about us.

Most difficult, though has been the physical separation COVID has cemented between us and Cynthia and James in Ajijic, Mexico, but thank human ingenuity for making video communication possible.

I hesitated before writing the above for obvious reasons. But "for everything there is a season" has worked for me in coming to grips with the urge to despair. In fact, Agnes and I are OK, even having some fun here and there. While we lament the habit-forming nature of this new, digital world, we are thankful for books and TV and Ipads, even social media for creating diversions from the sameness of days-after-days in physical isolation. Agnes is learning Dutch; mastering the throat-clearing G, now. 


How to walk in Christ's footsteps with its heavy admonitions to turn the other cheek, love your enemy, etcetera, is probably the most significant struggle for us who know that language well. To be like Job's friends with their "you (we) must have done something wrong" gets us nowhere; volunteering (as Agnes does regularly) in the food bank and the thrift store, donating what you don't need for survival to help those for whom survival is uncertain, phoning family and friends regularly to make sure they're OK, these things may save us from despair. As that famous saying (that's never been heard 'til now) goes "If you can't move the earth a mile, move it a foot … forward." (Pun intended.)

And finally, I repeat: Fortunate, lucky, delightful and content New Year to you All









Comments

  1. TYNJanuary 1, 2022 at 4:52 PM

    Wishing you a wonderful new year, with FEWER challenges (something I wish for us all)! Thanks for a terrific New Year's letter, George. You should hire yourself out for those of us much more pedantic and prosaic. Tom

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hugh SavageJanuary 1, 2022 at 6:42 PM

    Wishing you both a New Year as full of positivity as possible.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJanuary 2, 2022 at 2:58 PM

    Is Agnes shuffling a deck of cards? If she is planning a game of Cuss Rummy ( oh,oh; I mean Rummy 2000 :-) - a Mom Zach inside joke) could you invite us over. I almost got Gretta's family to play it last evening. If mother Zach were living, I would move back to Rosthern just to challenger her. Maybe you could make it a bit more enticing, especially now that you have planted the seed in my mind and emotions.
    As the others have already commented, I always enjoy your play with words, and play it is with you. With me it is a struggle, despite my verbal diarrhea.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Please hand me that Screwdriver!

-
Image
  The shower in our bathroom malfunctioned. When turned on, water sprayed out of places it shouldn’t, showering everything in the little room. It had to be fixed, and one look told me that a normally educated human with a normal battery of intelligence, education and experience should be up to performing a repair. I bought a new shower head and set to removing the offending part, but having no wrench that fitted the connecting nut, had to improvise with a pair of pliers, and a clumsy vice grip from my scanty tool collection. With my daughter’s help the repair did happen and blissful, uneventful showers were again possible.   Later in the same day, a screw holding the seat of a dining chair to its frame fell out, and although I do own a screwdriver with about 15 interchangeable screw tips, none would fit, and I improvised by forcing the issue with an inappropriate Phillips tip.   We all rely on whatever tools we own when it comes to navigating our way successfully through life in a co
Read more

Do I dare eat a peach?

-
Image
  All the talk of Joe Biden’s unfitness for the position of president of the USA must have others of his age—80 plus—wondering about their own fitness. Most of us octogenarians are well aware of our physical limitations, I think, but mentally? How can I know, for instance, if the lines I’m writing are logically sound, or if they fall somewhere between inane and gibberish? How can I know if my diminished capacity can be trusted to make such a judgment? And what if my friends are too kind to tell me when to close my laptop? Hearing an aging loved one tell the same stories to the same people every day has the able-minded nodding knowingly and cluckingly (that’s a word, isn’t it?). We’re obviously too kind and too hip not to know that people experiencing obvious dementia deserve to be “handled with care,” and we’ve devised places and strategies to preserve for them whatever dignity is still possible. But it’s not dissimilar from the pain-relieving, ointment applying, chair-exercising, p
Read more

A Sunday morning reflection on Sunday mornings

-
Image
  Eigenheim Mennonite Church, ca 1950 Exodus 20: 8-11: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God, in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy …” I sometimes think about this on a Sunday morning when I’m all dressed and ready for church, sitting in my recliner with a hot coffee on one armrest and a bowl of oatmeal on the other and the sun streaming in across the carpet and the Post Office closed, Bigway closed although the Coop Gas Station will undoubtedly be open. And I know the Seventh Day Adventists hold Saturday to be that seventh day and so gathered for worship yesterday and observed in their way what they understand is meant by “the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord.” And I did some Spanish study preparatory to a month in Mexico and learned that Saturday in Spanish is Sabado . In German, the se
Read more