What Are You Grateful For?
Happy Thanksgiving!
Today is Thanksgiving Monday. Over the course of the past few years Shandi and I have developed a habit that has turned into a bit of a life-saver, sometimes even literally. Every night, before we go to sleep, we turn to each other as ask,
What are you grateful for today?
The only rule to this activity is that you have to find something to be grateful for, even if it’s something as simple as being alive - which, incidentally, is usually my go-to on bad days. Since we started doing this a few years ago, I have been better able to regulate many of the frustrating things about being disabled. While I’m not interested in living a life marked by a continuous need to ‘get better all the time,’ I am also not interested in living a life marked by bitterness and irritability. Over the years I have come to understand that the best way to deal with bitterness is to get ahead of it, and the best way to get ahead of it is to be perpectually grateful.
Here are some four things I find myself grateful for this year:
I am grateful for good music that keeps me company during my lowest moments and my highest moments. I am especially grateful that I was able to see Nightwish in concert with my friend Amos, my first show since the dreaded pandemic started. In honour of that show, let me introduce you to the Floorgasm. Yes, you have to listen to the whole song, and no, you won’t regret it.
I am grateful for my wife, Shandi. We have been together 15 years now, married for 14, and she knows me better than anyone else on earth. Over the past 8 years she has also stepped into the role of my caregiver, something that she neither asked for, nor wanted for herself. I am daily grateful for her patience with me, especially during those moments when my PTSD is in overdrive and I find myself acting somewhat erratically. She knows how to talk me down from the ledge, and can always find a way to make me laugh when I need it. Without her, I don’t know where I’d be.
This past year I have re-connected with people from my past in ways that are especially meaningful to me. They have walked with me this past year as I have faced some difficult situations, both encouraging me and offering advice. Their love and care has not gone unnoticed, and while I can’t thank them by name here, they know who they are and how grateful I am for their presence in my life. 😍
One last thing I am grateful for, before I sign off for the night, is being back on campus and in class. It’s always been the case that the classroom is where I find myself the most comfortable, and I am grateful to both Shannon Dea and Jenny Saul for taking a chance on letting an old grad student sit in on a few undergrad courses. This term’s class in the philosophy of language, in addition to hitting all of my intellectual sweet spots, is revealing a fascinating difference in online vernacular between those of us who grew up online in the late 90s and early 2000s, and those who were born during those years.
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