This past week, as I started up the “beta” version of Beam Me Home, Scotty!, I also started sending out daily emails that I’ve entitled Doc in the AM.  Each day, I will plan to publish the email here as well, sharing with you on the blog the thoughts that I have about what it continues to mean to empower self-calm, engage survival, and energize life after War.

Below is my post from last Thursday, 26 November 2015, Thanksgiving Day in the United States.

For Your Service, Thanks.

In the United States, today is officially “Thanksgiving Day,” the day of turkey, the day of the Macy’s Holiday Parade, the day Santa Claus comes to Herald Square.

I’ve said it many times. I’ll say it again many times:

So often the “thanks” given to service members after War is a “thanks”  both well-meaning and yet sadly, somewhat off-the-mark. What a complex word it is, thanks, when one is speaking of life during War and life after it. So many memories. So many complications.

Perhaps that is why I continue to thank all of you who served for your willingness to choose, at least at some point in your life, to live for something, for someone beyond yourself. In a way, you knew that you were signing up for War’s complications. But in just as real a way, you had no clue. No one does. No one can.

But you could and you did choose to live beyond yourself, even if you weren’t quite sure what that was, beyond some vague feeling in your gut. Good for you. While sometimes guts lead us astray, sometimes they lead us exactly where we need to go.

Your gut may or may not have been leading you to War, but to War many of you went. That gut, though, just as importantly, did lead you to some type of life beyond yourself. I hope that I can be a part of a process, today and every day, to help you re-find that gut feeling inside you.

So that you can keep re-living it—or live it once again.

For that gut, for that moment and all moments that you wish to re-make after that, thank you.

Until tomorrow, be well,

Doc