It’s good to finish the year in gratitude for the thousand things that added moments of happiness to our lives this year — a year in appreciative review.

If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings
depended on how I am and what I do,
how would I be and what would I do?

Buckminster Fuller

Each of us is given only one day to live –
the day we call today.
We are never given a yesterday or tomorrow.

In two days, tomorrow will be yesterday
and we will be where we always are, today.

The idea of emotional vocabulary is interesting. Our emotional vocabulary includes the repertoire of emotional expressions we have developed over time. I know some people whose vocabulary is very rich, and others whose are more limited. We are most struck by people who dramatically express or lack the vocabularies for compassion, courtesy, honesty, love, passion, curiosity.

How well we “get along with” and connect with people may have to do with the similarities and compatibilities of our emotional vocabularies — that we speak in languages each other understands. Music, film, and the visual arts are great examples, because of their natural capacities for rich emotional vocabularies, of attracting people from across a wide bandwidth of international venues.

Hold a dear friend with two hands. Nigerian saying

The essence of the Japanese aesthetic is based on Wabi-Sabi. Here, beauty is expressed as poetry and grace through the principles of impermanence, incompleteness, and imperfection. This contrasts with the Western notion of beauty as spectacular, pristine, and enduring. Western beauty can be seen and heard from a block away and is expected to last forever; wabi-sabi beauty is experienced quietly, intimately and is momentary. It is an experience of transcendence in a single moment, revealing the nature of things.

Wabi-sabi is expressed in the Fujiwara no Teika poem:

All around, no flowers in bloom
Nor maple leaves in glare,
A solitary fisherman’s hut alone
On the twighlight shore
Of this autumn eve.

Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull
of what you really love.

Rumi

Little Italy this morning, the goombas gathered
for a last minute cannoli pickup at the dolceria.
The air is sweet with cookie orders
and the din of usual banter about what’s new
since everyone left Angelo’s last night.
The exits ushered by kisses to all the cousins.
Another day in paradise.

A friend was telling the story this weekend about her father who, while working for a New York publisher, one day shared an observation he’d been collecting while covering the mid-West. He suggested the company start a sports magazine, and so began Sports Illustrated. Never underestimate the power of an idea.

You live you learn / You love you learn
You cry you learn / You lose you learn
You bleed you learn / You scream you learn …

You grieve you learn / You choke you learn
You laugh you learn / You choose you learn
You pray you learn / You ask you learn / You live you learn

Alanis Morissette