These are days when gratitude might not come easy.
It's tempting to scan the horizon each morning and to let our gaze rest solely on the things that burden us: on the sorrow-bringers and the treachery they manufacture, on the terror we are daily surrounded by because of their seemingly boundless contempt for life, their insatiable desire to be cruel.
We can easily allow the perpetual storm of darkness they manufacture to obscure the light from view, to fool us into believing that the night has fallen on our best days, that the dawn might never arrive here again.
But this would be a mistake.
It would be playing right into the hands of the sorrow-bringers. To lose hope now would be to consent fully to them and their designs, to surrender this place and its future—and so we cannot.
For this reason, it is a life-sustaining, hope-preserving act to shift our focus from the bitter sorrow-bringers and to let ourselves dwell on those people who resist the despair, those who wield light in these black days, those who still walk defiantly in love.
They are everywhere if you’re paying attention.
Today, I am paying attention.
Today, I am dwelling on them.
Today, I am giving thanks for the fighters.
I am choosing to fixate on the ordinary activists who are living intentionally and beautifully in days when such things are most difficult—for the people who will not genuflect to inhumanity simply because it holds power and demands that we kneel.
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