Being Grateful for Our First Outdoor Concert 7/27/21

Last Friday was a big day for me. It was a big day for a lot of people too, the company included. The first live music concert since Covid and it was an especially exciting and emotional evening. The first outdoor show was always an important marker for me. The official end to the Pandemic and the official start of life getting back to normal. Being at a sold out concert on Friday was truly awesome and it reminded me how much we’ve all been through and sacrificed to get to this point.  The reality is, most of us will never forget the events of the last 18 months. Conversely, most of us can’t forget about them fast enough. Regardless, at some point in the near future, it’s all going to seem very routine again. But I don’t want to forget this feeling. The feeling of working really hard at something and having it work out. I don’t want to forget the lessons we’ve learned going through Covid. I don’t want to forget the bonds we’ve made. The challenges we’ve faced or the decisions we had to make that has lead us to this point. As life begins to normalize, it’s important to not minimize what we’ve been through and to be thankful for things we have. Lately I find myself in moments where I’m filled with an immense sense of gratitude. Being grateful is a way we honor the past and remember not only what we went through, but the people who helped us along the way. Gratitude takes up a lot of space and acts as an immune system for negative thoughts. You can’t be grateful and angry or negative at the same time. At the end of the movie American Beauty, Kevin Spacy’s character, Lester Burnham talks about gratitude like this; “Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…” I’ve always loved that line.