Dear 2024,
Fourteen years ago, when I was in the middle of a five-month road trip driving around the country seeking shama (inner peace), I started an annual tradition of writing a letter to the new year. I’ve largely kept all my resolutions, and I like to think that they have helped me grow with humility and compassion into a more centered, shama-filled person. However, being human means that my innate flaws and shortcomings will keep me growing until the day I die. That became abundantly clear this past November when I had a meltdown while lighting prayer candles on Thanksgiving Day.
Eric and I have four candles housed in repurposed sauerkraut jars that sit in a vintage white enamel tray. Years ago, we started a dinner tradition of lighting each candle for someone who needs uplifting. For the first few years, our sauerkraut prayer candles filled my soul. However, in 2023, I began to dread them. That’s because we don’t have enough candles for all the people we know who are in a literal fight for their lives, not to mention endless others struggling with loss and heavy life burdens.
Being an empath, I feel the pain of others deeply, often in a way that is detrimental to my own mental health. I can get flattened by the grief of others, as well as from the state of the world. Combine that with how I’ve spent the past year looking for answers about my own multiple chronic conditions that have affected me neurologically ever since I was in a 2022 car accident in Mexico, and that means our nightly prayer candles began to symbolize pain and suffering instead of hope and healing. So, on Thanksgiving, through a curtain of tears, I asked Eric if we could convert our nightly prayer candles into gratitude candles.
My reasoning: Endless small, fleeting moments of delight slip through the cracks as we routinely go through our daily motions. I want to condition myself to notice—and remember—each day’s micro moments of magic that bring a flash of wonder and awe.
Lighting our gratitude candles has been harder than it looks. It’s common to focus first on the big and the bad in life, and initially, we’d scratch our heads as we tried to remember the minute things we were thankful for each day. I think that taking notice of magic in seemingly mundane moments is like flexing a muscle. The more we do it, the stronger it becomes. It’s my hope that the effects of this practice are cumulative, and that we are rewiring ourselves to see through the cloak of pain and approach life with optimism.
My idea for gratitude candles arose from the puffs of breath of an early morning buck. The rising sun cast a pinkish-gold glow through the clouds, making the frost on the grass sparkle. I was sitting outside in my robe when 
the regal buck appeared, gingerly taking steps out of the woods towards me until he was standing smack dab in that strip of glorious early morning sunlight. His breath was like oversized puffs of smoke. It was so majestic that I said out loud to him, “What message do you have for me?” The answer was obvious—he was there to remind me to stop and enjoy the precious moment of the now.
In the past month I’ve lit gratitude candles for simple things that pop up during the day:
- The winter sun on my face
- The swirl of steam rising from my morning coffee
- Sitting on a park bench with Eric and Lunabelle
- Pulling carrots out of the ground on New Year’s Eve
- The childhood good luck marbles a friend gave me when he heard about my own health struggles
- A phone conversation with Lunabelle’s sister’s mom, a surprise friendship that began with DNA tests for our dogs
- The swirling and swooping synchronized dance of a flock of red-winged blackbirds flying in front of me as I drove on I-78.
These little moments are the ones that sustain us, providing reassurance that despite the chaos of the world, there is always comfort to be found in the ordinary.
So, with that in mind, dearest New Year, my promise to you is to seek out micro moments of magic each day. My guess is we won’t have enough gratitude candles for all the little things for which we are thankful. But that’s the way it should be.
In short, Year 2024, I think I love you already. Please love me back.
Sincerely,
Kee Kee
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