Random Gratitude Post not on a Friday - Grateful to Rest and Explore

It has been six months since my last gratitude post; some may know that I posted a weekly gratitude Friday post for over five years. I ended it as a weekly thing after 268 consecutive posts at the close of 2025. Even though the truth of the matter is that I am a lottery winner of life (figuratively) I am not naturally grateful. I need to work at it as I have what I have termed an Eeyore Brain. When it is left to its one devices I fail to see the full cup but the empty space above it. I had planned to occasionally revisit the blog and not necessarily only on a Friday. The thing that precipitated this out of the blue post is a recent two-week vacation, the first two-week vacation for Julie and I in 12 years. It was overdue.

Julie and I really needed a vacation and together we realized that there was no good reason to wait to later in life as we are in our early 60s. One morning in late fall last year I stumbled on to a video on the last ocean liner of world, the Queen Mary 2. After posing the idea to Julie, we jumped in with both feet and started to plan a week in England and then a transatlantic crossing home from Southampton England to New York City.

When we landed at Heathrow, we traveled to Southern England, including the area of Exmoor National Park around Lynton in the Southwest and Corfe Castle and the Jurassic Coast in east Devon. In the five days on the ground in England (one day lost to American Airlines stranding us in Philadelphia for 26 hours) I put 1,000 miles on a car. I loved driving across the countryside. I rounded more traffic circles each day than I would in a decade in the states, all in the wrong direction and with the wheel on the other side of the car. We walked along the 600 foot cliffs at Valley of the Rocks with goats, and saw birds of prey soaring at eye level. We explored Cleeve Abbey dating from the twelfth century and looked for fossils on the beaches at Lyme Regis, (Julie found an ammonite). We met a man who asked if we were Yanks and in the same breath added his dad and his uncle served in WWII. He said with a grin they could not have done it without us. We quickly agreed that as Churchill said that it was one of finest hours.

We boarded the QM2, the jewel of the sea. I have read books about the great ocean liners of the world and accounts of times when travel between continents was by ship. Stepping onto the deck of the largest and only remaining ship designed for the North Atlantic was beyond my wildest dreams. It is grand in ways few things are in our times. We came east on a jet overnight in less than 7 hours, and we returned westbound in 7 days, with five of them being 25 hours in length. As we crossed the North Atlantic, we ate food, read books, listened to music and relaxed in the pools and sauna. It was everything we had hoped for in respect to relaxing and rejuvenating. We traveled into NY harbor past Ellis Island. Julie and I both have family who first set foot in their new homeland on that ground after the same crossing we made.

We live in a world in which everyone rushes through life in their own little bubbles. We are in the most technologically connected era the world has ever known yet paradoxically people are more isolated than ever. Perhaps the best thing about our crossing were the people we met from all over the world. All from different places with different experiences yet it was so easy to find common ground. We traveled as a cohort and as the days passed, we would recognize people. We made new friends. We met an amazing couple from the UK and together attended a roaring 20’s gala event dressed to the nines after a four-course dinner and then went to the onboard club and shared a lot of laughter.

Several years ago, I wrote about the importance of having a child’s eye of the world. This article in HuffPost notes that kids play more than adults, and in so doing stay in the present. As adults we focus on what needs to get done and not that which is new. This is in part why early life memories are so vivid. To stay young we must remain inquisitive, vital and passionate about the world we live in. We can get crusty and jaded over time. It does not suite us well. It is not what I want for me and my remaining days here. We need more play in our lives in order to live more fully. I see this in people who get the most out of the later years of life and this time at sea and exploring the UK opened up my child’s eye again.

In a few months I will have 40 years of recovery. Part of what propelled me into recovery was a dark yet insightful moment when I was able to see a short, painful and empty life unless I made a major course correction, one consistent with strong values, service and integrity. The journey of recovery. The rewards of recovery within the first year included travel and service to others as have all the years in between. Life is challenging and rewarding and the two are interconnected in ways I failed to understand in the hubris of my youth. Hedonism does not fulfill one in the way that  purposeful challenge does and in doing so there are rewards. I have had opportunities that have afforded me a life where I can cross a trip like this off of a bucket list shared with Julie by my side.

I am so very grateful that we decided to do this trip. Our conversation continues about experiences we want to have with the time we have left here. None of these things were a given in my life, which could have easily ended decades ago in despair. I am grateful that this life, with challenges and failures and now a transatlantic crossing is the one I am having.

What are you grateful for today?