on gratitude

Gratitude normally comes easy. You can sit down and tick off a list of things you’re thankful for in under a minute. Family, friends, life. But what happens when “normally” is non existent and you’re not seeing your family or friends and life is just harrowing?

We might have to reach back a little further this year for the gratitude. It might not be there, on the tip of your tongue, waiting to spill out as you go around the Thanksgiving table and say what you’re thankful for. It’s hard when that Thanksgiving table is smaller, more private, when the noise of the holiday is muted, when you’re missing the very people you want to engulf in gratitude.

Things are weird, and with that weirdness comes an upending of emotional state. Where in other years you might be flippant and think about how thankful you are for Pop-Tarts and twitter and the expanded Star Wars universe, there seems to be no room for flippancy now. You’re grateful just to be alive, to still have your job, a home, your health. And then you might feel guilty about having those things while so many people are jobless, homeless, sick, or dead. When 250,000 of your fellow citizens are lost to a virus, losses that were mostly preventable if the proper action was taken early on, it’s unseemly to joke how you are thankful for Apple TV’s Ted Lasso.