Morning

At 8:50 a.m. Saturday morning it is 26 degrees and overcast here in Upstate NY. The logo is indicating snow, right now it's quiet out there. The snow from Thursday's storm is everywhere, the banks of snow on the edge of everybody's lawn near the street is high from the plow trucks, but the streets are clear and snow and ice free. This town does a good job of keeping it clear, not all towns around here do.

We've got just a few days left in 2012. The best news of the year in my opinion is that we don't have Romney for president. What a disaster that monstrosity would have been. This is not a ringing endorsement of Obama by any means, it's clearly a lesser of two evils type of acknowledgement. Call me naive but I do believe in the lesser of two evils political theory.

Otherwise, 2012 was a harsh year. We all know that. The brutality we witnessed was gut wrenching and ongoing - Sandy Hook was the worst and a most egregious assault on all our psyches. The family's of those children are aching. It's a hard wrong to make upright and somehow bring our humanity back into a place of more awareness and compassion. We have compassion, we really do, it just gets buried by our lifestyle, a lifestyle that many of us find less and less desirable and necessary.

I was speaking with a friend the other day who told me that they spend a lot of time during this holiday season crying. They've had many hard experiences that they had gone through during this part of year. It's the memories that weight us down. Lots of people get through the holiday season in a state of grieving or sadness. I know that a little of that is physical but a good deal of it is in the mind. The holiday season is double edged, isn't it. I think the best advice here is to use this time to be a little more sensitive and understanding and basically and most importantly try to be kinder and little less self involved. This is advice to myself too. We're in this together, that becomes clearer and clearer to me each year and like everybody else I have been dumb to this point many times in the past.

I did not set out to write something with a less than optimistic tone, but I have. The best thing I recently heard is this. There's really only one mark that we want to set our sights on. That would be learning to be content - content with whatever place or status or amount of wealth or ability that we have, even if it's at the bottom of the totem pole, a place we've all hung out at anyhow or may be at now. So this is my resolution for you and me, let's figure out how to be truly content, because if we were truly content, what else would we need, what would be lacking. We'd be happy.