"I need to have someone to thank."

 This may not be the exact quote, but it is what I recall Richard Thompson, one of my favourite musicians,  said when he was asked why he was drawn towards religious belief (Sufi Mysticism in his case, but I suppose it matters little). It was one justification for religious belief that really did bypass my agnostic defences, because it spoke to a feeling that I have in spades about life. 

I know that I may be condemned as one of those damned glass-half-fullers, but I do feel so grateful for nearly everything in my life and nearly everyone in my life, and it is good to verbalize, vocalize or in any way just acknowledge this. I don't know what other social, evolutionary or psychological purposes this  gratitude serves, but I need to express it to myself and to others. Maybe I need to speak it to confirm it.

I am most grateful, I suppose, for all the love that I have found myself surrounded by in my life, and for that which I have been lucky enough to be able to return. I had parents who were calmly and unconditionally loving and who would have gone all bear-parent to protect us if it came to it; I had and have a wonderful brood of siblings who love me, support me, and keep my feet on the ground. I had teachers who seemed genuinely interested in the learning of a nerdy ham/show-off, and I had friends who I still know now after 51 years.

I was lucky enough to meet Cro and spend 24 years with someone who was so good and upright and fantastic fun, and whose love - and mine to her - was unquestionable. I have been doubly lucky to find love again since then. I pinch myself sometimes when I wake, shake my head and say "you jammy bastard!!"

It makes you realise that one thing you may regret at the end of your life is not telling people enough that you love them. Partners, lovers, friends, families, all of them. Did I also mention that all my friends here in Woodbridge (and around the rest of the world) have been so good to me over the last four years, in all the ways that I needed? Sometimes involving alcohol, sometimes not. 

And even beyond all the people that you have the chance to be grateful to in person, there is still an ocean of thanks that you feel when you move through this world and interact with it. I read Huckleberry Finn for the first time last year while crossing the USA by train, and I felt such a sense of gratitude towards someone who had been dead for over a hundred years that I really wished he was sitting in the next seat. And when I have recently read the astoundingly poetical science-explaining books by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, I have felt so grateful both for what he is able to do with words and ideas and also for the transformational insights into our world that he is describing. 

And so far I have only been talking about gratitude for the acts and works of human beings. You can move outwards from those to the place, and world, and history and cosmos in which you find yourself. I am hugely grateful for having such a solid sense of place and history and 'where I come from' (Mayo, Pudsey, the Kirstall End and the continent of Europe amongst others). I, like Warren Buffet, have also so much thanks to give for timing, place, race and compound interest. Well I suppose gratitude rather than thanks in this case, as it was the roll of celestial dice. 

And finally, as the picture at the top always reminds me, I have to be able to express my thanks for the glory of this world, dawns and stars, and glassy fjords and teeming birdlife, and the absolute joy of being alive. 

And still none of this makes me want nor need to have a God to thank (though I absolutely support all those who do thank him/her/them). But I do need to give thanks, and I always will.