In America, on the fourth day of every July we celebrate our independence, and on the fourth Thursday of every November, we celebrate our dependence. We set aside a time to be grateful for what we have, regardless of what we don't, and in humility we say thank you. This feeling of gratitude is an acknowledgement of our good fortune, and therefore an admission that we come to most things of value through no fault of our own. The person who says thank you only to their self does so with a strange and misguided kind of arrogance. It's not by your own power that you are even the person you are today, but that the best parts of ourselves are formed by providence and love.
In that way, today is a day to take survey of the good.
It is a profound thing to do, and for many of us something we are woefully deficient at in our daily lives. We run around stressed about timetables and responsibilities, and lamenting plans gone awry. We consume ourselves with regret and sadness, much of which is just longing, and sometimes even greed. I know I do this to a terrible degree. My want for a better life and a better me is a good thing, and my drive is often inspired by a noble desire to do good. Nonetheless, the negative emotions I feel upon failure and struggle are a kind of insult to the life I should be living with wonder joy and appreciation. I have much, and I always have.
I have always been blessed, but I have also always been stressed, sad, and overwhelmed. It's foolish, and I'm working on it. The good news however is that it's in the depths of my sadness that I find my most indelible sense of gratitude. Eventually, for every one of us, life will be as hard as we never could have imagined. Tragedy and heartbreak and difficulty will at some point hit hard enough to make an embarrassment of the mundane worries and longings of everyday, and to be so painful and loud as to drown out any remembrance of the good. It is in these hardest of times that I'm always faced with an honest and unavoidable fact: that I can't do it, any of it, on my own. Therefore the thing I'm most thankful for is suitably simple: that I don't have to.
For me this is always a religious feeling. I'm thankful to God, not just for all He has blessed me with, but also for His presence, which means I'm never alone. You don't have to be religious to appreciate this sentiment though, because the thing I thank God for most often is exactly the same. I thank God, often, for the people I've been blessed with.
I'm tremendously lucky to have my friends and family, and there is no end to my gratitude for all those who read what I write. I'm thinking of all of you today. Thank you. I hope you all know that you're never alone, that I'm here, and in most instances that I'm the least of what you've been blessed with. Relax today, think of what you have, know that you're loved, and know that this alone means you're very, very, lucky.
