In the fall of 1962, I was old enough to appreciate the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fact that I might not live to my thirteenth birthday, just days away. By then depression and occasional mania were a constant in my life, but to my teachers I was simply an underachiever. I spent a lot of my free time that fall punting a football from one end of the yard to the other. Had the air raid siren three blocks away gone off then, I probably would have climbed a tree rather than run to the cellar. I was just a kid, but I had already made my first grown-up decision - that I wasn’t going to be around in what was left of any post-nuclear world.

In the spring of 1970, while I was pretending to be a student at college, President Nixon invaded Cambodia, and I felt the world had truly gone mad. Several months earlier, I had heard sirens in the middle of the night, and couldn’t help think what a relief it would be to have it all end then and there. Two years later, terrorists killed 11 Israeli Olympic athletes, and I felt the bottom drop out of my soul. There was no positive spin I could put to anything in the world, and art and music were my only refuge.

In 1976 I landed on my feet in New Zealand and experienced a probationary sense of rebirth. Two years later, I felt sufficiently optimistic about the world to bring a child into it. The constant twin companions that were my depression and mania stayed at bay long enough for me to complete a law degree and embark on a career as a financial journalist. From a distant shore, President Reagan came across as a cartoonishly dangerous saber-rattler, and in 1985 when New Zealand adopted an anti-nuke policy I felt a sense of pride that my adopted country had taken a stand.

Shortly before that, my marriage flamed out on me, and in 1987 I moved to Australia, only to experience a manic blow-out six months later that left me alone among strangers. World events were leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, but I feared it was a false hope when no one came forward with a vision of a post-Cold War future. In the meantime, I watched US warplanes over Iraq and felt we had learned nothing since Vietnam. My alternating depressions and manias were temporarily resolved by moving back to the States.

My spiritual path by then had taken me through many beliefs and philosophies. I drew comfort from Buddhism, which still seems a best fit for my temperament, but oddly enough, after overcoming my initial revulsion, I found myself drawn to the great Hebrew prophets, people of rare vision who warned of God's wrath if his people did not mend their ways. Unfortunately, no one listened.

The nineties to me were very much like that. We seemed to be sowing the seeds for future disaster, but no one was paying attention. Then came Sept 11.

I watched with dismay the tragedy and relived the horrors of all my previous dark moments. This time, at least, I knew how to take care of myself. Then something different happened: I found myself giving my daughter words of assurance. When I replied to emails they were with words of hope. I witnessed good people responding to the crisis with heroism and compassion and felt a flag go up in my soul. As the days and weeks progressed, I sensed us coming together as a people, experiencing a new sense of family, community, and spirituality, with many of the wounds of the past healing over.

I even dared to dream that this crisis would give us the courage to tackle the big issues and big problems, and the world would end up better for it. Something similar had happened with the World War II generation. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too late for us. Wild dreams, perhaps, but we all need our dreams.

So it is I look to this Thanksgiving with a deep sense of loss and grief. I can never erase Sept 11 from my mind, but at the same time I am beginning to feel a profound release. Ever since before my voice broke, my perception of global madness has marched in perfect lockstep with my own inner madness. Things may get worse before they get better, but for the first time in my life I feel cautiously optimistic about the fate of the human race. So as well as giving thanks for what is, I will be giving thanks for what may be, of a better world than the one we were born into. Call it a miracle, this new capacity of mine for seeing hope out of despair. This was another rare attribute of the great Hebrew prophets. Out of despair, hope - I will be giving thanks for that, too.