Gratitude #1: To the Left

I can't believe that we are already approaching the holidays. The movement of time has become quite the scandal as I've gotten older. A school year felt like forever when I was a kid - so long and life-shaping. Look at how we commemorated it with yearbooks and fancy photos! It was nine months! With the exception of pregnancy, nine months ain't no thing!

So we find ourselves, once again, in the last months of a calendar year, and it happens so fast!

Anyway, with the approach of Thanksgiving, I want to try and do ten gratitude posts before I stuff myself full of turkey and yams, so for the next few weeks, I'll be getting my thankful on. I've been trying to notice things I've taken for granted and make note of them so I can be a little less self-absorbed. (Who, me?)

The first thing I'll express gratitude for is being able to use both sides of my body. 

That may sound like a weird thing, but I recently read the book Left Neglected by Lisa Genova. I had no idea what it was about, but I've read many books by Lisa Genova, and she always writes about neurological disorders, so I knew it would involved something of that nature. It turns out it's about a condition called "left neglect" (which I'd never heard of and therefore, didn't catch from the title of the book until it was introduced in the story). 

Left neglect is a neurological problem (resulting from stroke or other injury) where the brain can't process anything to the left. You don't know there's food on the left side of your plate or text on the left side of the page or a person standing to your left. You don't use the left side of your body and might even think you're deaf in your left ear or lose track of where your left limbs are. 

I can't even imagine what that's like because I so easily have access to "the left." So today I'm expressing gratitude for something I haven't given enough credit to - the easy, symmetrical use of my body. I can do the hokey pokey without second thought - right arm, left arm. Right leg, left leg. I can do the Tootsee Roll (to the left, to the left), and unlike Zoolander, I can turn left.