The Month of Giving Thanks

November is the month of the most popular Holiday in the U.S.: Thanksgiving (or so I’ve read somewhere). As a result, often during this month people focus their attention on other people and things they are thankful for, before rushing into the stores for Black Friday, an, the follow-up cyber Monday for the online shopping mania.

For me it was another incredibly busy and hectic month, which I’m not going to annoy any of my potential readers with. Suffice it to say that I have no new updates in regards to my fiction writing. I have at least been able to catch up on some reading though. Specifically, the trilogy of four – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, easily one of the best book series ever. 

Onto the topic at hand. Being thankful, appreciative of, or grateful for people / places / things. There are different words and ways to describe this, but ultimately, it conveys the same sentiment. To take the time to acknowledge – either just in one’s mind, or with actions and words – the validity, the importance of others in our lives.

Just like the two sides of a coin, there are two opposite sides to being thankful that I want to talk about:

• The lack of it
  or
• The overextension of it

The lack of thankfulness

This can easily happen when we begin to take things for granted. The most obvious example of this is the day and night cycle. Everyone alive today and for the foreseeable future (talking about millions of years) will be expecting the sun to rise and then set, to be replaced by the moon and vice-versa. We take it as an absolute certainty and even though nothing in this universe is absolute, the existence of the Sun and Moon gets pretty close to that – at least measuring with our own human existence.

And yet, when’s the last time you heard anyone say that they are thankful for the Sun or the Moon? Sure, you’ll hear people say they’re happy when it doesn’t rain (or does, depending), but just us being thankful for the Sun to exist and keep existing?

At a much smaller scale, something that most of us could do a better job of is to simply thank people around us for the things that they do. Again, it’s easy to fall into a routine and take things in our life as a given. If someone helps us out once in a while, that event will stand out and we’ll likely acknowledge it. But if that same person ends up helping us every day – how long until we forget to say a simple “thank you”?

It’s simple to think that others “must know” that they are appreciated – take the time to make sure to say it out loud, and perhaps show it.

The overextension of thankfulness

If you ever read anything about gratitude, you probably heard that it’s limitless. Meaning, you can be thankful for a million things and then add another million to the pile. However, if we get too much of a tunnel vision, or worse, somebody expects to be praised for their work or whatever, we can run into the problem of complacency.

It is absolutely possible to be thankful for something and still knowing it could get better. Without it, we’d still be living in caves. We wouldn’t have modern medicine. We would think that the Earth is in the center of the universe (Galileo Galilei – father of the scientific method – never forget the persecution of the Catholic church).

And yet, there’s this idea that some people have, as society becomes divided and people disagree on things that “if you don’t like it here – just leave”. Another one is to be thankful for the opportunity to work – even though with the technology we have, we could all have shorter work hours and have more time to spend with family, friends, people in general.

In my mind, this is just a perverse extreme of thankfulness. Again, we can acknowledge and commemorate all the sacrifices people before us made, in order for us to live in the world that we do and at the same time, point out that there are still improvements to be made. That there are things today that are perhaps worse that they’ve ever been in human history (global warming, wealth inequality).