Thanksgiving: Wants, Needs and Giving Thanks.

Posted on | November 22, 2010 | Comments Off on Thanksgiving: Wants, Needs and Giving Thanks.

Mike Magee – Thanksgiving, 2010

Longing takes too long. To pray, to hope, to dream of someday being satisfied fills too many every days. What have you seen, or done or felt this year for which you are grateful? Nothing? Everything? Something? Are your needs that great compared to others who somehow find happiness with less? If so the answer is in the want, not the have. To want too much in the face of so much need diminishes the wanter, not so much in other’s eyes but in his own. For wanting is insatiable when it escapes, pulling the wanter along, a victim, distracted from the life and needs and fulfillment all around. Walk upright and awake to your surroundings. You have shoes and feet. Others have neither. If you must want, want to discover your fullness, and when you arrive, be that. In the meantime live with what you have and appreciate it for what it is. Learn to balance what it is you want with what it is you have.

Through the ages, others have said….

Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
Andrè Gide

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I murmured because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.
Persian Proverb

Learn what you are, and be such.
Pindar

We must like what we have when we don’t have what we like.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton