In my teens and 20s, I was an insatiable giver. “Give big, give early, give often,” was my mantra. Giving became an avocation and I spent tremendous energy perfecting the craft of anticipating people’s needs, rushing in to answer perceived longings, giving more than expected, and always taking less than might be offered. Not surprisingly, I easily found myself plenty of willing “takers.”

Everything flourishes in the nourishment of our appreciation: plants, people, the Earth, moments. When we live with that appreciation, we flourish.

If we are interested in greater flourishing in our lives, it will surely serve us to surrender the burden of incessant goals, shoulds, aspirations, and the need for accomplishments. We can release the litany of ideas about what we must have and need to fix, who we should be, and whose permission we might require before we can be grateful for who we are.

If, as they say, life is like a glass, and we are the way we see it, there are days when things can feel pretty darned empty – half-empty at best. And then, there are days when we revel in the glass’s hopeful half-fullness. Some days, if we are really lucky, the water seems to rise toward the edge of the glass, leaving the half-empty mark behind. And, on certain, special days, the glass feels full to overflowing.

This month I celebrated my 64th birthday. I don’t share this news with hopes for either benevolent wishes or reassurances that 64 is really not that old. I am good with all that. I am sharing this because it truly makes me happy to get to be alive yet another year – and I finally figured out the secret: growing a bit older every day seems to be the only way to continue to be alive.

The Golden Rule can become the “Grateful Rule” if we turn it around to say: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. This now becomes an exercise in tuning in to another person with care and curiosity rather than projecting our own needs and desires on people.

The ability to wake up to another new day — one with which we will surely need to wrestle and reckon, but one that will also teach and transform us ... this is the unpromised gift for which to be grateful.

For everyone alive now, and for everyone who has ever lived, we are united in the fact that life invites us to show up again and again into mystery. Much of our freedom depends on cultivating greater perspective about being with uncertainty, however and whenever we can.

Difficult mental and emotional patterns can teach us a lot about developing positive patterns, if we approach our tendencies mindfully, compassionately, and with gratefulness.

I came to gardening late in life. Not till my mid-40’s did I have the courage or attention to put living things into my heart or the ground and take responsibility for their survival, much less their thriving.