What now seems like a lifetime ago, David and I were working on our first documentary together. It was called Embracing Judaism: Reaching In, Reaching Out, Reaching Up. (Don’t look at me, I had nothing to do with the title—that’s all I was given and asked to create a documentary about it!)  Anyway, creating the documentary was a great experience for us—we met and interviewed absolutely super people including Rabbi Paula Mack Drill (she wasn’t a rabbi back then—I told you it was eons ago) Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter and Rabbi Woznica among others. And during Rabbi Woznica’s interview, he said the following:

People aren’t so terrific necessarily, by nature. That’s why there are 613 commandments, which tell us how to, how to be good. Children may not be so terrific by nature, so the tradition says: listen that we accept human nature, and now we’re gonna create a good human being. We’ll do all we can to create decency and goodness.

I can’t tell you why, but that has stayed with David and me for now almost 17 years. And just last year, although I hadn’t spoken to him in over a decade, I tracked Rabbi Woznica down (he moved from NY to Los Angeles) and called him. He took the call immediately, delighted to hear from me. I told him that I was calling because I thought about what he said every day, that, at heart, people aren’t so terrific and that we need rules to keep us on the straight and narrow. That these thoughts had such an impact on me and I wanted him to know that. I could tell he was absolutely thrilled – to think that someone was walking around and that you had made such an impact…!

So now fast forward, dateline present day. Coming back from a meeting, I see a student waiting outside my office. As I get closer, she starts beaming at me, the biggest most beautiful smile on her face. I smile back, though honestly, although she looks familiar, I have no idea who she is. Inviting her in, she proceeds to tell me that I had advised her years ago and told her exactly what to do to obtain the job she dreamed of. Now 6 years later, with a bevy of television internships under her belt, she was graduating from Purchase and starting to work at a great job at VHI. She says she stopped by to tell me how grateful she was and how if it weren’t for me and my colleague-in-crime Isabel, (who figured out the best college to transfer to and helped her with the admissions process) she wouldn’t be where she is.

So I am so grateful to all the people who have said or done things that have stayed in my mind, caused me to think, rethink and reflect. I am grateful to all the people who have made me smile and feel loved long after the words they said, or gift they gave, or act of “loving kindness” seemingly faded from memory. But I also am grateful to those people who have found value in what I have said or my point of view. And I am grateful to those who have the courage, fortitude, moxie ? to come and tell me about my impact on them. The “sleepers” of my life who actually say, “What you said, I have never forgotten,” or, “What you did” (some small thing that I didn’t even know would mean anything) made all the difference.”   To all of you, please know, that every time I think of you, I have a smile on my face, a bounce in my walk and a heart full of gratitude.

So I am going to go running, and I’m a little jazzed. After all, I have been running for over thirty years so that’s far more of my life as a runner than a non-runner. And quite honestly, it can get a little boring. Years ago, when I started, I would pass the time talking. I would pick up my friend Arlene, from her home on 5th Avenue and we would enter Central Park and run miles and miles. One year, when we both had rented summer homes in Greenwich and we were both training for a marathon, we used to run fifteen times around a one- mile park, putting little twigs down in one spot so we would remember what number loop it was.

Anyway, all that’s to say I’ve done a LOT of miles—gone through hundreds of tapes on a Walkman and now I must have twenty different Running Playlists. But still…after all these years, and all the marathon training, I feel that I have literally run the equivalent of to the moon— and back!!! And it’s a bit of a bore.

But now I’m jazzed because for the first time, I’ve downloaded all these comedy podcasts—and I have a vision of me upping my mileage, running for hours listening to comedy routines.

I start off with Adam Carolla, and wouldn’t you know, he starts talking about exercise. And there’s a whole riff, but at the end he’s talking about how he plays little tricks to pass the time, tricks to MAKE THE TIME go faster. And then he comments, why does he want it to go faster? He says, “I’ll be on my deathbed, and all I did my whole life, was try to trick myself and make the time pass, so I could then die. Well the jokes on me.” And I thought, he hit it on the head. I am ALWAYS impatient, tapping my toe when I wait in line, thinking of all the things I have to do, impatient to finish a run, finish the newspaper, finish the what? Rush to where? What is so friggin’ important that I don’t actually exist in the moment and feel grateful for that moment? I’m waiting on line at a drive through bank— but aren’t I grateful that I HAVE a car—AND money in the bank? God knows I remember quite clearly when I had neither. The joke is going to be on all of us if we don’t slow down and literally smell the whatever- the fresh coffee wafting out of Dunkin’ Doughnuts—(that’s my nod to David!), the grass being mowed (my mother LOVED that smell) the soft leather in the car. I have to remember not only to be grateful – but also to give myself time to be grateful. I mean when you think about it—where ARE we all running?

Tonight is the Yahrzeit of my father’s passing.

For being my father’s daughter.

So I am smart enough to figure out that for David to go down to Florida and see his Mom once a month, even for two days, is a better idea than for him to wait around for four months to a half a year trying to cobble together a week- long vacation.  Four months, becomes five, six or seven, life gets crazy—but two days every month—well, we can manage to squeeze that in.

So why I don’t apply that same principle to everyday conversations with my friends, I have no idea.  You know what I mean—I think about Jo-Ann who I know I should call because I haven’t spoken to her in a week, but I know that I’ll need a good hour, because there’s so many things to discuss, but I don’t have an hour, so I wind up not calling her, and then it’s ten days and I have to keep a Jo-Ann list for all the things I need to discuss: why whenever you find something in Costco that you really like, they stop carrying it; how many bras, cheap and expensive, we’ve bought that wound up in the dead bra drawer;  concern about the missteps in academia; disgust over the litany of lies spilling from the Republican contenders’ mouths…And it’s not only her, but basically everyone—too little time for almost anything, so when I stop and think, Gee, I haven’t spoken to my Uncle in a month, I then say—but I don’t have an hour!!!

I’ve got to try and stop thinking that there will be the perfect time, or the perfect amount  of time, and a perfect set of circumstances. That one of these days, I’ll just be able to relax on my couch with a glass of Coca-Cola and sit and talk, without a concern about the time—the reality is that I’ve got to grab five or ten minutes whenever, and maybe not cover every nuance of the restaurant David and I had dinner at the other night  or the gossip about Aretha Franklin’s weight, but be grateful for the friendship, the great laughter that’s always in large supply  in those brief, but very special and much needed few minutes.

My Dad, may he rest in peace, was a stockbroker. Not just a stockbroker, but a great stockbroker. He parlayed a very little bit of money into a very nice nest egg– and it was through a great mind and vociferous reading.

One of my most favorites of his adages (besides his oft repeated “fear and greed rule the market”) was that you only really have three stocks in life– and if one of them is down, it really doesn’t matter what’s going on with the other two. Meaning that if you didn’t have your health, it didn’t matter how great your job was or how much you were loved.

I miss him very much. I always knew that, when he died, I would miss him as much as I do, and for a long time, I toyed with telling him that, thinking that in some way, the information would make him happy. Knowing how much he was loved. But David convinced me not to– and he was right. It would have only made him sad to think that I was hurting and more importantly, knowing my Dad, to think about all the love and adulation he would be missing out on.

So when I went on Monday for a very fast but extremely painful test– which turned out just fine– I thought about how grateful I am to live a life without physical pain (oh yeah except for my shoulder thing!) ; to live a life surrounded by amazing friends and a more amazing husband;  to have the proverbial sun in the morning and moon at night; and to have had, for as much time as I had him, a truly amazing, difficult, confounding, brilliant, unusual, and loving father. I am truly unreservedly, unabashedly grateful.

A funny thing happened on my trip to Israel over the summer. I got in touch with my ex-husband, whom I hadn’t seen in over – well, let’s just say, I hadn’t had any contact with him in literally a lifetime.

We had gotten married when I was doing my Masters at Northwestern. We returned to Israel, lived there for a year or so, then returned to NY. The marriage didn’t make it much longer after that.

We split up, he returned to Israel, and though the first year or so, we spoke on the phone occasionally, calling Israel wasn’t the “no big deal” that it is today. He married, I did a Ph.D., married, he had two children, divorced, and we had no contact and no friends in common– so the years flew by and I actually didn’t even know if he was alive.

Then I’m in Israel and we speak and his voice is exactly the same. He was in the north, David and I were in Jerusalem, we couldn’t work out time to meet, but no matter, he was coming to the States in December.

And so the other day, there he was. He was flying back to Israel that evening, so we simply sat in his hotel lobby and talked. How do you bridge the years — so many years? Almost everything that I am is a result of things that I did after we were together. How do you start? Ph.D., CUNY, CBS, Bravo, cats, Emmys, David, death of my parents, marathons, triathalons, DIVA!!! Impossible to compress, highlight, consolidate?

But yet.

When we sat sharing a piece of chocolate cake, I was at peace.  I am grateful for the life I have, and grateful for the fact that the person that I was so many years ago had made two good decisions– one, in marrying a man who turned out exactly how I expected- hardworking, incredibly loving, kind and generous, and the second, in divorcing him, knowing that however much a mensch he was, however utterly committed to me he would have been, it really wasn’t the right time for me. I look at him with affection, not longing; respect, no regret; happy for the life he has, and utterly grateful for the life I chose and have now. Tomorrow at 2:30 pm, my mincha moment, I will stop and think of him and I will be grateful for the path that took me to meet him, for the quest for knowledge that forced me to leave him, and for the incredible blessing of good health that allowed us to meet and embrace one more time.

It’s hard to imagine that I would ever put Angelina Jolie’s name in anything I ever wrote or talked about, much less in the same sentence with me. But I was thinking about her recent interview on 60 Minutes and her comment that she had done the most “dangerous” and the “worst” things, and that for many reasons she shouldn’t be here.

Watching Investigation Discovery (ID) Television also makes me think about why I made it through the gauntlet of being young and stupid and so unequivocally sure that everything I thought, write, read or did was so smart.  I, too, am shocked to be here.  Like a white noise machine, I keep ID TV on in the background when I am working: doesn’t require me to pay attention, doesn’t matter if I miss a whole interview or more, I get the gist. And although the crimes investigated are, most often committed by people who know each other, a good many are not. A random meeting at a bar, someone follows someone home, it sounds farfetched, but then again, we still don’t know what happened to that lovely young college woman in Indiana, Lauren Spierer. One day she’s happy to be back at school and having fun at a party—the next day, she’s gone.

And so where usually I try to focus on all that has happened in my life and all that I have that I am grateful for—I also think about all the things that didn’t happen.

The things in the past, the crazy parties, the places I went where I shouldn’t have gone, the hitchhiking I did all over the place… the things that could have gotten me in trouble, death, injury, communicative disease.  But it’s not only the things that I have done that might have caused a less than positive outcome—to put it mildly!—it’s also the things, the every day things that turned out OK, when they might not have.

Like when we were in Uganda shooting Yearning to Belong.  There was lots of politicking going on because in a few weeks, an election was taking place. One day, driving through a village, we were surrounded by people engaged in a peaceful march. The car began to sway as the mass of people, in excitement, peered inside the car (cars are not a run-of-the mill occurrence in the villages)—but the crush of people was frightening, and their excitement could have gone in another direction.  I saw this ending badly.  Images of South Africa and Amy Biehl never left my mind until…well, they’ve never left my mind.

I suppose we all have those things that didn’t happen, calamities that passed us by, a missed flight, decision not to study forensic science, to dump the boyfriend before anything got too crazy—I am so grateful for all those things I didn’t do, didn’t happen to me, didn’t succumb to. Truly grateful for that which never befell. When I think of what might have been.  I am truly, astonished, and grateful.

Without warning, the great freak Fall snow of 2011 came.  On a lovely Saturday afternoon, we lost power around 1:00 pm.  I thought it would come back shortly; no big deal.  By the evening, David had gone to edit and still no power.  Which meant of course, no lights, no eating (since I didn’t want to open the fridge and let all the cold air out) and worst of all no heat.  But I still felt grateful. ’cause I had my Iphone and my Ipad which were both reasonably charged.  Surely, this power outage wouldn’t last long– we’d never had an outage that had lasted more than 1/2 day.

Fast forward five days.  Five days of being in the dark, five days of coming home to a cold house, five days of no food, since by then we had to throw all the food in the fridge away.  Thankfully- for both her and us– we gave our entire freezer of food to someone who was going through a bad time, and literally without food.  I thought of all the things I took for granted, a warm toilet seat, the ability to work at home, the luxury of not walking around with five layers of clothes and a blanket around me to keep warm.  I know I should be grateful every friggin’ minute of every friggin’ day– and yet instead, no doubt, I become cranky over whatever, and slip into complacency.  Live even one day, much less five, without power and see how much we take for granted.  Eric Hoffer wrote: “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.”  I already am drawing up a New Year’s resolution to ask for after school tutoring.  I need it.

Be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit

I can’t claim that for my own—it’s Albert Schweitzer’s, but I was thinking about it today after I got off the phone with my BFF and my Aunt.

I have been soo busy (though not that busy that I won’t stop and take the time to be grateful at 2:30 pm!!!!) but busy enough that I really don’t feel that I have time to do anything but work.  Being grateful to have a job, and be able to spend a good part of my time creating films that deal with the social justice issues I care about, is already a lot to be thankful for.  But it is all time-consuming.  Working on titles, the music, dealing with lawyers, rights, E & O insurance, roughcut, audio mixes, color correction, trailers, and a partridge in a pear tree, make it hard to do anything else.  And then dealing with schedules and grading, and FB pages, and marketing—where is the time for good books and friends?  I seem to continually push them down my list of priorities, thinking that “I’ll call tomorrow” or “Just let me finish this project” and then I’ll call.  But the truth is, it’s tiring to do without friends.  And there’s always going to be another project.

So I picked up the phone, called my BFF to discuss the stuffing in the turducken we’re going to have for Thanksgiving, then called my Aunt, who is like the dessert of every good meal: sweet– but not overly; interesting; a bit decadent; and totally worth every calorie—or, in this case, every precious minute.  I was reminded of Schweitzer, but having my higher education in theatre, I can’t help but think of Tennessee Williams as well,  “Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families.”  I now have some pep back in my step.  Grateful.

Don’t ever think for a moment that I believe it’s easy every day to feel grateful.  Some days I think, I just can’t stand all this– too much work, too much nastiness, too many people looking out for their own damn ass and hiding their true greedy intentions under psuedo caring, too many times the bad guys win, too much unrelenting injustice.  I feel like I am in a continual whirlwind– it’s hard enough holding on to my hat much less be grateful!

I think it’s hard to be grateful– because I am serious in trying not to simply “lip service” to the whole gratitude concept.  Everyone “says” they’re grateful–but we never seem to be able to hold on to the sense of just how lucky we are, how amazing just living is, for more than a few minutes at a time.  It’s absolutely tough to do– today for example, I got a call at 9:00 am this morning from someone complaining about my stand advocating for students’ rights.  Then there was a short power failure. I still can’t find my key to the house, and I haven’t yet had time to send two birthday cards or returned five calls and six emails– it ain’t easy to feel gratitude when you’re overwhelmed with feeling overwhelmed. But at the risk of being accused of plagiarizing myself (because I do use this quotation from Rabbi Tarfon in our latest documentary), “You are not required to complete the task, yet you are not free to desist.” So I will take a deep breath, look over at my husband getting ready to go for Rosh haShanah dinner, and I am, and will be, grateful.