Many of my days I have no recourse but to take on the forces of darkness: self-absorbed people who care only about privileging themselves and their circle of sycophants at the expense of the vulnerable: students.

I fight the good fight—but it’s tiring.

And today, driving to work I felt weepy—that feeling where, if anyone looks at me cockeyed —the tears would start leaking out the corners, edges, of my eyes, like baking a blintze too long and cheese oozing out…

I had a choice to make. Stand up for a friend who had been wronged—but it was a year and a half ago…or just keep my head down and not enter the fray. Could I sit in a meeting with a wordstorm swirling around me, burrow down into my IPad, and ignore the spectacle of rewards being heaped on a man who had behaved abominably?

It certainly would be much easier to distance myself. I have done it once or twice—gotten into a book and ignored the fact the forces of darkness were trying to sell students’ education to the nearest charlatan. History, philosophy, art, literature, nah, students don’t need it- let’s just train people to operate machines without thinking. It’s great for my heart to disengage—not so much for my soul.

But today, to mentally check out and let evil be rewarded? Could I forget a friend who was wronged, hurt, made miserable? Really, I suppose there wasn’t much choice. Time has passed, it’s true. But “scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” People must be held accountable.

In the end, of course, I put on my breastplate, picked up my spear, and went into battle.

Today gratitude seemed to take a right turn at Pluto.

I was most grateful for myself.

It used to be that a blizzard was something I actually enjoyed.

I would hunker down with a good book and cook up a big batch of chicken soup, or bake a cake and enjoy the sound of the howling winds outside while I sat, warm and cozy, seemingly invincible to the vagaries of Mother Nature.

Then came the big storm in October 2011, sometimes known as the Halloween Nor’easter and even, I later learned, Storm Alfred! And we were without power for over 5 days. And a year later there was Super Storm Sandy, where we were spared, but my neighbors had to patch in to our electric because their power was down.

So when the “Mammoth” “Massive” “Once in a Lifetime” storm started bearing down on us on Thursday, rather than planning which cake I would bake or downloading a new book, I was a mass of nerves, fearing a power outage. My town was sending out email notifications- alerting the town that power disruptions were likely. All I could think about was that the last time we had an outage was October and the temperatures were in the 40s and 50s. Now they were in the teens. Whereas I had never thought about the chaos a blizzard or hurricane could create, now it was all I thought about.

Thankfully, for us, the blizzard, though dumping a foot of snow outside our home and further beating down a shrub that has been massacred in 2011, didn’t steal our power and heat and we were really barely inconvenienced.

So although I feel that my innocence may be gone as to how I perceive storms and blizzards, I can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a colossal wake up call, a reminder of all that I have. Like power. Like HEAT! It may be boring, but I am reminded of the words of Shoshana Zuboff, one of the first female professors to be tenured at Harvard’s Business School: “Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted…” I may have lost some innocence, but hopefully I’ve picked up a heightened reverence for all of the most basic things I have – and for which I am truly grateful.

Three days ago, the Financial Times announced that the number one “toy” for kids this Christmas will be a tablet. http://www.cnbc.com/id/100337273

In November, 60 Minutes http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57556456/horrors-revealed-at-north-korean-prison-camp/ ran a story about 30 year-old Shin Dong-hyuk, believed to be the only person born in a North Korean prison camp that has escaped to tell about it. When he was asked, “Did anybody ever explain to you why you were in a camp?” Shin replied, “No, because I was born there, I just thought that those people who carry guns were born to carry guns and prisoners like me were born as prisoners.”

What do I bring up these two stories? What seemingly imperceptible thread have I found connecting them? It’s the idea that we can get “in the habit” of doing things, thinking things, believing things, if we just do it.

If we were all brought up that every day, you had to stop at some point of the day, and just really see what’s all around us, and be grateful, well that would be part of our life, as natural as well, the proverbial brushing of one’s teeth or eating sugarcane if you’re in Uganda! It wouldn’t feel foolish or be this impossible task. We would just do it, because it would become part of our DNA. We wouldn’t think about it as a difficult thing to do, it would just be something we would do as we do all the other things in our day, eat meals, watch television, feed our pets, go to work, set up play dates, rehearse a proposal, talk on the phone, solve problems.

Today,  comedians to politicians to educators, bewail the idea that younger adults don’t really talk to each other, there’s no conversation—it’s all texting. Well maybe texting has won a round, but what about us trying to win the next fight but making 2:30 pm an inviolate time where we consider all that we have?  It could be gratitude for that new Ipad or simply the fact that you were never in a North Korean prison camp.

I think perhaps this thing I have about gratefulness is a result of fear.

I am afraid that one day, I’ll wake up and everything will have changed – or for that matter—nothing EXCEPT one key, monumentally important thing has changed – and not for the good. And then I’ll be looking back on the day before and wonder how was it that I didn’t know. How was it that I didn’t realize all that I had?

My thinking about gratitude goes back a long, long time—even before codifying it with the inauguration of my running watch’s alarm. I remember working really late at CBS/Fox – 10:00/11:00 pm — leaving the office to go down to the street (6th avenue and 48th ) where a car service waited to take me home. And I remember thinking that however tired I was and however much I was pissed that I was working so late and that no one appreciated me, I was really, really grateful that I had a job where I could call for a Town car to come pick me up! And I remember thinking that at some point, maybe I wouldn’t have a job like that and I would look back at these times and wonder why I didn’t appreciate them more.

So maybe a certain soupçon of anxiety is in the recipe for my gratitude. I never want to wake up and think to myself why didn’t I appreciate the job more, before I got too old/sick /bored to do it well. Or why wasn’t I more grateful for the friends that I have before they’re gone.

I don’t really think fear should be the motivating factor for anything, but yet… If fear of a heart attack makes you lose weight, not so bad. Kudos to fear. If trepidation makes one study even harder for an exam, not so shabby. And another point for fear. If my anxiety that I won’t fully appreciate all that I have until it’s gone, makes me kiss David extra hard each morning, hug each friend I see, use my cats as blankets as I watch television and suck the juice, pulp and all, out of each day, well then is it really fear? Or is it taking time to be grateful?

And then there are the days that the well seems to run dry.

Bad people at work—I mean really bad, lying, ethically challenged, morally corrupt, the list of adjectives go on.  Simply put, imagine Republicans.

My shoulder like always is killing me.  Can barely turn my head to back out of my garage.

One of my stock accounts tells me that I shouldn’t pay attention to the daily summary as their computers aren’t really good!?!?

My little Noble doesn’t seem to want to eat his morning wet breakfast.

My hair consistently looks like shit.

In a nutshell, I don’t feel very grateful.

I think a lot about my utter dearth of gratitude at 2:30 pm – and feel pretty bummed about it.  After all, I have a great home, husband, career, friends,  enough money to do what I want, buy what I have a hankering for—how dare I not be grateful.

Then it dawns on me that I am simply being normal.  It’s impossible to keep up such a heightened sense of gratitude all the time.  Voltaire’s aphorism, “Perfect is the enemy of good” which is what Rabbi Irwin Kula talks about in one of our Mincha Moment videos, is truly something I have to take really seriously.  If I don’t feel grateful at certain points, it doesn’t mean that I am a “bad” person, an ungrateful wretch or that I won’t feel my usual sense of amazement, awe and gratitude tomorrow—when I awake and see my husband,  go out to run, post another video, eat a rare porterhouse  steak off the bar-b-q.

In the end, I guess I am actually grateful that today the well seemed to run dry.  To borrow from my good friend, Ben Franklin, “When the well runs dry, we know the worth of water.”

I may be the only one I know who actually likes to iron.

Weird, huh?!

And I actually have a bit of history with it.

Many years ago, when I went to Israel and lived on a kibbutz, I was given a choice of work placement: laundry, kitchen or children. (Much later, I fought the sexism of these positions and demanded and received a neutral job — in the chick incubator. Much later, I taught dance at kibbutzim throughout the valley- but, I digress.) I chose the laundry and when I arrived, I was asked if I was good at ironing. I remember thinking “’Good’ at ironing? Who spends any time getting ‘good’ at ironing?” But I said sure, and was given a seat at a table in the corner. It was there, piled up high, seemingly to the ceiling, were slightly damp, rolled up shirts. And it was there that I sat, from 6:00 AM every morning, and ironed. Other than a short break at 8:00 am for breakfast, (which I don’t eat) I sat at the perfect-height-for-the-job- table and ironed till noon, all the while chatting with the much older women who worked there. One of them, Hannah Fuchs, eventually “adopted” me, her family becoming my “kibbutz” family, offering me every Friday night, a place to go and be nourished and nurtured. For me, ironing was cozy, relaxing, I got a lot of work done, schmoozed a bit and felt very needed. After all, if I weren’t there to iron, half of the kibbutz would be walking around all wrinkled!

Now, all these years later, I still find ironing, in many ways, quite soothing and curiously rewarding. For in my world, where it often takes six months or more to raise the funds for a documentary, and then another wedge of time to produce it, starting and completing an activity in a number of minutes is quite satisfying. Going from a bunch of rumples to crispness without having to deal with malicious colleagues, self-important associates, and full of crap clients is a little bit of heaven.

And I like the results— so I just don’t stop after David’s dress shirts and polo shirts — no, I’ll iron my around-the-house garb and even particularly creased pillow cases. Every time I iron, I am grateful, not only for my Rowenta and the setup that makes it easy to watch television as I do my work, but for my time in Israel and the love of the Fuchs family, now all long gone. But most of all, for the ability to enjoy the simplest of activities, to see the value and beauty in the mundane and to start and complete an activity in a wrinkle of time, I am most extraordinarily grateful.