Agnostics! We are sometimes regarded as sneering skeptics, untouched by the wonder of the world around us. As Thanksgiving approaches and everyone dutifully expresses gratitude, I wonder if agnostics are also seen as ungrateful turkeys. (Pardon the expression. I'm generally close to vegan myself except for eating salmon for its Omega-3 fatty acids.)

I hope we agnostics do not strike others as curmudgeonly ingrates or wishy-washy fence-sitters, but if we do, I write to remind myself of how many things and people I *am* grateful FOR and how many aspects of life, however poorly I understand them, I am grateful TO. I also write to remind myself of what I *can* believe in.

I am grateful for my family, despite the troubles it has been beset by and because it has weathered most of them. I am grateful for the grace -- bestowed by what or whom, I don't know -- that got me through a very difficult year, first losing my bearings and then my job in what amounted to a Class 5 tornado of mistakes and misperceptions. I am grateful to be a citizen of the United States, more now than ever; I didn't think we'd see an African American president during my lifetime and am amazed by the changes we've made as a nation since the Civil Rights marches I watched on television during childhood. I am grateful for my friends. So many of them stood by me this year and supported me, assuring me things would eventually be all right and would eventually make sense. Smart friends! In the long run, they were right.

I am grateful for the teachers I've had, both formal and informal, who opened my eyes to ideas that would be closed doors without their guidance and leadership. I am grateful for seasonal changes, reminders of my own seasonal changes as I move through a lifetime. I am grateful -- ridiculously so! -- for my little iPod, an early birthday/Christmas present from my husband, who knows how much I love music, all kinds of music. I am even grateful, in retrospect, for the problems that blindsided me this past year. Ultimately, they made me realize what a gift it is just to be alive and how transitory and unimportant most material trappings are. There's probably a reason they're called "trappings." I don't have my job anymore, but I still have an identity, one much roomier than whatever it was I had previously.

I've heard in another context that the most important thing to know about God is *you're not it (Him, Her, Whatever).* I found myself humbled by the recognition of my insistence  on controlling every possible aspect of my journey through this world. I had to relinquish at least some of that control -- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was wrestled from me piece by bloody piece -- and surprisingly, I am even grateful for that. It's given me a degree of freedom.

Who or what should receive my expressions of gratitude? I don't exactly know. People, absolutely; I connect with them as individuals and believe in the overarching power of the human spirit, despite our many shortcomings. I would also have to thank what I'd call the Great Coincidence, all the strange synchronicities that graced and ultimately saved me as I crept (or worse, skipped) through some pretty shadowy valleys.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, regardless of your belief, unbelief, or uncertainty. It will at the very least be a day to reach out to something greater than stuffing and football games and to connect with the amazing fact that people manage to survive and even thrive in adversity, thanks to -- something.

9/19/09:  It's been several months now since I left my job due to disability.  I'm only 56, my job loss was unexpected, and I am still casting about for a sense of identity and also, I suppose, for financial security.  What a time to lose my job -- smack dab in the middle of what they call a recession, but we all know what that means.

Fortunately, my husband has come out of semi-retirement with a vengeance and has several projects in the works.  But I straddle the cusp of the generation of women who wore white gloves to dress up and the generation of women who burned bras (not that I ever did, and I suspect the whole thing is apocryphal) and "became the men their mothers wanted them to marry."  What feminist said that?  Having been a bit of a workaholic for years -- or more than a bit, maybe -- it's hard to relinquish control and just take things day by day.  I guess ingrained habits, if they're chased away from their first hiding places, just find other places in which to become entrenched.