Holistic Gratitude

First of all Happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating in the States!

This Thanksgiving probably looks a lot different from what we are all used to with fewer people around the table due to social distancing guidelines. The country has gone through a lot this year: a pandemic, a contested election, civil unrest, among many other events. Even with all of these events, Thanksgiving comes around the same time as a reminder that we all still have things to be thankful for.

While the word gratitude almost seems like a cliché these days with the caricature of wellness gurus and Instagram influencers pushing gratitude journals, there’s a reason people actually swear by it. Gratitude works. However, it’s not enough to be grateful when things are going good, its also important to be grateful holistically - for the good and the bad.

Speaking from a personal experience, last year I went through a lot of struggles with figuring out what I really wanted to do - a quarter-life crisis if you will. I was struggling with not living up to my expectations in various fields of my life and at the time I couldn’t really see past my struggles. In the struggle, I never imagined that the trials and tribulations could lead to something useful. It’s easy to not be able to find meaning or be grateful for the struggle when you’re in the struggle.

It’s easy to be thankful or grateful when things are going well. It’s much harder to do so when things are going bad. However, looking back at last year now, I know that the struggles I went through happened for a reason and taught me some valuable lessons. That’s what all of us need to keep in mind during these hard times.

This is not to say it’s easy though. Especially over the last few weeks, my family has had to deal with the death of a lot of our elder members. There is a lot of pain this Thanksgiving and right now it can seem like there’s no sense in being grateful for anything. However, these are the times where we must really count our blessings for the things that we might take for granted right now.

This is a hard moment for us all, but it also constitutes a test. We need to “look for the good within the bad” as the Stoics would say. Will we all be able to?