Daily Gratitude List 11.1.22
What Comes After Halloween
I’m grateful for a fun Halloween. I’m grateful to finally see the possibilities. I’m grateful to feel useful. I’m grateful for the way I feel when I wake up. I’m grateful for a string of good coffee mornings. I’m grateful to be sober today.
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Here we are, it’s November and the door to the holidays just cracked open a little bit. I’m not really ready for this and to be honest, there were some things I really needed to get done this Summer and not sure how that ended so quickly, too.
It was Halloween last night here in NYC (probably where you were, too) and it’s always fun to see the costumes. I did not have a costume yesterday, but have had a long-held desire to invest in a really good one, kind of like owning a tux. For me, that costume would be George Washington and I would definitely go all in—the powdered wig, the boots, the whole nine yards. It would be this version of George Washington, crossing the Delaware River to deliver Christmas greetings to the Hessians1:
I’m not sure that Halloween is really considered an “inspirational” holiday, but I was thinking last night that in a funny and sometimes a kind of twisted way, Halloween ends up being about self-expression and invention: You get to be whatever you want to be.2 I’m always impressed when I see someone who has put a lot of thought into a costume—sometimes a frightening amount of thought.
For sure, Halloween’s popularity is probably tied more closely to escapism, but I like the tinge of self-invention. If you could be anything you wanted to be, what would you be? In real life, that's a terrifying question and it’s one I really haven’t asked myself for a long, long time.3 At some point in the podcast,4 I talk about the third year of sobriety being a time to figure out, “what am I doing with this?” That’s very much where I am. I’m now working on four years of sobriety and I also turn 60 this month and this all definitely has the feeling of the beginning of a new chapter.
New beginnings often require endings. I think my own third anniversary quasi-malaise was mostly about reflecting on the last few chapters and realizing it’s time to move forward. That’s a very scary thought and maybe Halloween was the perfect jumping off point—wasn’t the point originally to celebrate the spirits of the departed? Walking around yesterday and seeing all of the costumes was a lot of fun, the creativity, the self-expression and the silliness, made me think that those are important components of whatever is coming next for me. So, that’s how I’m heading into November. Oh, and I found a penny coming home on the subway last night.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Perhaps this is the year! Post-Halloween sales, here I come.
Sort of, within reason and temporarily.
I kind of knew I was going to be a lawyer eventually. I think I realized that for sure in 8th grade Algebra
I really like this idea of celebrating the versions of me that have departed! It makes them less likely to show up in my 1 a.m. insomnia mind-racing.