Seeing the Bigger Picture

For over two decades I've done a special Thanksgiving meditation.  It hasn't always fallen on Thanksgiving Day; sometimes I've done it a day or two before or after in order to accommodate travel, cooking, or social demands on the "big day."  Each year my Thanksgiving meditation has proven one of the most spiritually rewarding focuses of my whole year, and once again the practice was powerful.

This year the meditation happened last evening, and I noted a difference in how my thoughts presented themselves.  Generally, I've tried to think through the year, day-by-day, beginning with the last Thanksgiving.  As I got to each day, I tried to recall something I'd been grateful for that particular day.  On years when I've kept a gratitude journal the practice has been easier than others, like this year, when I had been sporadic in doing so.

What I discovered last evening was a struggle to even remember what had happened in the last year, even month to month, much less day to day.  I believe the crazy pace of the last year of having 20 glass balls in the air at any given time, any one of which would be irreparable if dropped, has "smooched" (technical term) the year together in very non-linear way. 

After fighting to make the old way work, I surrendered to what every meditator knows is the best way to reflect: let go of control.  When I did, an amazing thing occurred.  I held the intention to be grateful for the last year, and I surrendered to how that would occur.  I was able to observe that even amidst the craziness, something larger was afoot.

Instead of working my way through the year in a linear, one-dimensional way, clusters of events, people, and occurrences bubbled up.  What might have seemed unrelated on first blush actually did connect from a spiritual growth point of view.  I observed progressions of seemingly unrelated events that occurred during the year that actually supported bigger spiritual lessons.  Normally, I would have been grateful for single occurrences.  Last night allowed me to begin to see how random events weren't isolated at all, but were very much related to evolving me spiritually.

My one-dimensional gratitude practice quickly evolved into a multi-dimensional one.  This seems like important learning to me, and it is learning that I don't want to lie fallow until next Thanksgiving.  I am considering "upping" the gratitude journaling practice to reflect throughout the year how an event on any given day is connected with something that occurred previously. 

Before meditating last night, I watched on episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's series "Cosmos," which aired earlier this fall.  The episode that I watched last night examined DNA and how most human DNA is shared across all species, including plants.  Earlier this week Louis Henry Gates looked at DNA on his "Finding Your Roots" program, where his conclusion across humans is that what we share is much more similar than what distinguishes us.  Sometime in the last year, I read that humans around the world share about 97% of our DNA with all other humans. 

As I drifted off to sleep last night, what spun in my head what how connected everything is. Events in our lives are not random and disconnected.  Neither are we as beings or even as a species isolated.  Seeing the bigger picture truly does allow us to see who we are: we are One.