Being Thankful for Each New Morning
Sometimes being grateful for the simple joys of life on regular days away from Thanksgiving can help us live with more innate gratitude. And then when we can establish that, we’ll notice how many small but significant things we have in our lives to enjoy just a bit more even something as simple as waking up to another day on the planet.
This time of the year, Thanksgiving moving on into the holiday season, is special in so many ways. So many of us have a lot of very meaningful traditions and time spent with family and anticipation for love and joy to be experienced in great abundance. For all of these reasons, I so look forward to November and the Thanksgiving holiday. But in some ways, as grateful as I am on Thanksgiving, there’s a day I’m even more grateful for.
The day after Thanksgiving is always very significant to me because on that day back in 1992, I had a cerebral arterial venous malformation (AVM) rupture Thanksgiving night so I didn’t wake up the next morning. The AVM caused a three-week coma and required eight brain surgeries and years and years of effort to regain so many abilities we completely take for granted when our health is sound.
Now, decades later, those early months of intensive therapy and brain surgeries are more distant memories, almost like a different life entirely. But every year on the morning after Thanksgiving, I’m reminded how fortunate I am to be alive and am yet able to run and bake cookies and bread and read and hike in beautiful places and travel and laugh and care about the important people and things in my life. The morning after Thanksgiving reminds me to be grateful that I’ve woken up to yet another day full of potential and joys to be experienced.
What other seemingly obvious and generally overlooked things to we have in our lives that are like the blessing of waking up to another morning? Those things that are so innate to our daily experience that we generally don’t even know to be grateful for them. How about in the hectic morning routines of getting kids to school, we could focus a bit more gratitude for the fact that we have schools to send kids to that, despite their flaws, are generally safe and rewarding places for kids to learn. How about while driving in traffic to work, we could focus on how relatively comfortable that ride to the office really is with the heater going, maybe a favorite podcast on the stereo and maybe even a warm beverage to sip on. And in the evenings, while rushing around picking up or dropping off kids or partners at appointments or events or practices, we could hold a small place in our heart for the thrilling fact that we are contributing to building strong and capable future leaders of the world by giving kids these opportunities.
I know it’s always so much easier to say we’ll practice gratitude than it is to truly carve out that headspace to give it root. But maybe we could set some new traditions around Thanksgiving or on any other day, to make those small and simple parts of our lives that make things just a bit better, a bit more doable, and a bit more reason to be thrilled that we have another day to live on this planet.