Thanksgiving Week: Gratitude

“Karma is a word, like love.  A way of saying ‘what I am here to do.’ I do not resent my karma – I’m grateful for it.” – The Matrix:  Revolutions

If Columbus had stopped to ask for directions, they might celebrate Thanksgiving in India, too.

2020 has been a very difficult year.  It’s not over, in fact just like a horror movie, you think it’s over, and then you look at your watch and realize there’s still 20 minutes left.  2020 might still have surprises left for us, and there are plenty of reasons to think that 2021 might be worse than 2020.

But the beauty of life is that life isn’t about avoiding difficult things.  Comfort is not really our friend.

Why?

The warm comfort of a bed is nice.  No sane person would disagree.  But the comfort of the warm bed is a trap.  Very few things in life are accomplished from the comfort of a warm bed.  Not to say zero things, but this is a family friendly blog.

What does create accomplishment is risk, change, and discomfort.  2020 has so far been the poster child for each of these things.  But now it’s time to take a pause and reflect.

And, yes, be grateful.

Lighthouse?  Have you ever tried to lift one?

Gratitude is the basis for a fulfilled life.  Practicing gratitude provides lower stress, better sleep, and generally better health.  It makes people around you happier, too, because who likes living around a tool?  Gratitude might seem like something that you’d do for other people, but it turns out the biggest beneficiary is . . . you.

So, in that spirit, following are some things I’m thankful for.  The order is sort of random.  In the comments, let me know what I missed.

I’m thankful for the country of my birth.  I was born in the United States when a vast majority of the world was under horrible oppression.  I remember hearing the stories on the news and asking Grandma McWilder why I was so lucky to be born in the United States when I was five or so.

I don’t recall being satisfied with her answer.  Regardless, I am still very thankful for the chicken and noodles that she made me – noodles made from scratch in the way only a Southern-born Grandma can.  You might like your grandma, but I assure you mine was the best one ever.

Oh, wait, that’s Queen Elizabeth II going to go see Princess Diana . . .

That easily brings me to my next gratitude.  I’m thankful for my family, past and present.  As long-time readers know, I’m adopted from within my family.  But what I haven’t mentioned before is that I was adopted by my family at the very last second possible.  I had just been placed with a new family, but my parents reeled me back in through a court battle to overturn the Electoral College pending adoption.

I’m thankful for that, too.

I even wrestled the kid who was adopted in my place when I was in high school (this is true) and beat him.  It was on points – he wasn’t bad, but I knew was going to win from the second we shook hands.  I didn’t find out that he was the replacement kid for me until later that year, after we had wrestled.

I always carried a piece of paper when wrestling, if my opponent turned out to be The Rock.

Obviously, his parents got the inferior model.  But don’t feel bad for him – his parents were millionaires several times over.  And, honestly, unless my parents were related to me by blood they would have put me (rightfully!) in a burlap bag weighted with several heavy lead weights and dropped me in a lake.

I was that bad.  Really, I was an awful child until about age 9.

My family has rough spots on it like every family.  Real families hardly ever resemble a 1950’s sitcom family.  But I have had The Boy come home after hearing some drama his friends were tied up in and say to me, “Pop, you have no idea how lucky I am.”

Yeah, The Boy, I really do understand.  I’m just as lucky as you.

I’m thankful for every gift I was given at birth by God.  Or, you might think genetics, but who brought those people together on that cold winter night in February, or that hot summer day in August, hmmm?  Oh, wait, we’re back to the “warm bed” argument.

One thing I really have learned in life is that the gifts you were born with aren’t gifts you can be proud of.  Should you be proud of your hair color?  Your height?  Of course not.  Those are things that you are born with.  Similarly, I’m not ashamed that my shiny head is used as a beacon by the ISS when they overfly my house.  I can’t control whether or not I have hair, so why be upset about it?

Okay, not at all true.  I can type well.

But you can feel some pride (remember, it’s rightfully a sin) at what you do with those gifts.  Be (a little) proud of that.  But if you were born smart, strong, and incredibly handsome like me?  Don’t be proud of that.

Be proud of what you can do with that.  Remember, potential without action is . . . failure.

I’m thankful for every experience I had in 2020 that made me stronger.  By definition, the parts to be thankful for are the tough parts, since eating Ding Dongs®, PEZ™, and Coors Light© on the couch isn’t a great path to achievement or enlightenment.

Even though it really, really sucks, the tough parts of life are what make us better – Nietzsche had that one figured out when he said that what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.  Exercising every day is hard.  Even the act of exercising is hard – people get big muscles by constantly tearing (at a small level) the muscle fiber so it grows back stronger and better.

My feet and hands have callouses.  How do you get them?  Hard work.

Hard work leaves its mark on your body.  If it doesn’t break you?  It makes you stronger.  Ding Dongs™ never make you stronger.

What steps should you take before an explosion?  Large, quick ones.

COVID-19 gave me (and certainly some of you) plenty of times to get stronger.

  • For a while, I worked from home. Then I had to fight my way through a zombie horde relax with my stockpile of toilet paper that I had in the basement from way before the ‘Rona.
  • We reviewed our stockpile of storage food and bought just a little extra, always leaving things on the shelf for others.
  • We watched as entire portions of the local, national, and international economy collapsed. We were forced to think in ways that were outside the box of our previous lives.
  • Finally, we watched as cities burned in a way that’s never happened during my lifetime – exceeding the L.A. riots. Does this happen without the WuFlu?  Nearly certainly not.  Does it make us stronger and smarter?    It shows the truth of what Leftists want – destruction of our very country.

I’m thankful for the work I have had during my career.  During my career, I’ve had the ability to help individuals grow and serve entire communities.  That’s kind of cool.  Who knows what will happen next?  I don’t.  One of the biggest gifts a person can be given is the opportunity to help others on a big scale.  I’ve done that.

What’s next?  Who knows?

I don’t.  That’s because:

I’m thankful for the nearly limitless number of opportunities that exist in this world, even after COVID-19 if we are smart enough and quick enough and virtuous enough to grab them.  Ideas aren’t the currency of life – executing an idea is.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have the same great idea at the same time.  After that?  You have to turn that idea into reality.

And most people don’t or can’t.  So, is opportunity out there?  Certainly, even if you’re 18 or 80, though your time horizons and the types of opportunities you can pursue differ.

Seriously, thank you.

I’m thankful for you.  Seriously.  I’m glad you keep coming back.  2021 will, in my estimation, give us more surprises than 2020 did.  I hope it gives you every experience that could help you be stronger, better, and more fit for the next world.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

28 thoughts on “Thanksgiving Week: Gratitude”

  1. What has been weird is that for my family personally, 2020 has been a pretty good year. It just seems worse because of how bad things elsewhere have gotten. I need to be more focused on the good stuff we have rather than on the bad stuff I can’t control.

  2. John – – I am most appreciative of the humor and message that you serve up for we Drplorables. It helps us get through the week, the month, and now the year.

    Thank you for what you do !!

    1. Bobo,
      Thank you. I will promise this: I’m trying to get better each and every week. How else can I dominate the world??

  3. John, it is with gratitude that I THANK YOU, for the wilder witticisms, and uncanny observations. It seems that you have come up a little short in the area of graphs with bikini chicks in them though. I love your work.

    Peace.

    1. Uncle Milton – I will endeavor to bikinify more things – my apologies! Everything is better in a bikini, except a rat terrier.

      Thank you so much.

  4. In spite of everything, I am thankful most of all for the truth. My family is my life, and my kids more precious than anything, but I am really grooving on the sudden abundance of truth with which we are increasingly surrounded.
    I mean, we are now getting confirmation about things I only suspected. Stuff I deduced early in life but could not prove. Issues that seemed reasonable but were derided as conspiracy. Matters that were only opinion now turn out to have been the honest truth, all along.
    This is remarkable, and it gives me great hope for the future (although, the path to that future is going to be unpleasant). You can really sense the awakening, and it’s all because we have been given a glimpse of the truth, and truths supporting it.
    How refreshing, and especially tasty is the way in which those of us who have quietly fought this fight can now stand forth, openly, and know that we were right.
    So, in short, this is something to be truly grateful for, because now one’s duty is clear, doubt can be removed, and the way forward is set firmly upon a foundation of truth. The fight to come, for all the marbles this time, will at the least be solidly supported.
    The best Thanksgiving present ever. God Bless America.

    Mike in Canada

    1. Mike,
      Thank you. Truth is in much shorter supply than it should be. That, in itself could be a future post.

      But the Truthis is just as you said – a gift. “Ahh, the giftie God gie us, to sie ourselves as others sie us” was what Burns said (going from memory).

      The Truth is the biggest gift.

  5. John, I am thankful for each and every one of the things you so adroitly mentioned, and also the privilege of reading your piercing humor three times a week. Thank you.

    I am also thankful for PATRIOTS like Matt Braynard and Sydney Powell that are going after COLD HARD EVIDENCE of election fraud, focusing on absentee ballots and Dominion Voting respectively, with a “chips fall where they may” attitude. I’ve donated $100 each to them. You should too. Matt is closing up shop and will release his results this week; Sydney is still going strong and promising “epic, bibical” lawsuits starting in Georgia. Their work is spinning up as a currently very confusing but promising whirlwind and is about to make the jump to lightspeed one way or another. Grab some popcorn.

    https://twitter.com/MattBraynard

    https://twitter.com/SidneyPowell1

    I really, really hope Sydney (the former Federal prosecutor turned defense attorney that successfully got Gen. Flynn’s guilty plea reversed) is truly the Kraken On Steroids she says she is. This week will tell.

    1. Thank you, Ricky. I appreciate every comment.

      Who knows what the future will bring? I will say this – hold fast in belief in yourself. You’re worth it.

  6. It’s easy for me to be frustrated with the things that have happened in 2020, and to treat them with a light cautionary touch since I have not experienced them directly, though honestly if I were to experience SARS-2, I probably would not survive to reflect on it.

    Because of this, I’m grateful for the blessing of a temporary holding pattern. I hope to be resuming my college science classes instead of being a houseplant, although sofa and sweats are comfortable.

    I’m grateful to God, grateful for my wife, and my family past and present. I’m grateful for my country even though it started to have that intro to the Hunger Games feel to it in early June of this year.

    I’m also thankful for things like this blog. On M, W, F, I check on it during breakfast. I usually eat breakfast by myself, so no, my wife isn’t glaring at me wondering what that laptop is doing on the table. Lunch is a different matter so no laptops allowed.

    I enjoy how this blog makes me think deeply about all sorts of things. I’ve read books on pandemics, zoonosis and global health, Russian Revolution, Yugoslavia, CW2, the Big Sort which in part has been driven by this blog. Those topics aren’t particularly positive but they are very 2020.

    So as a result, do I have a better feel for the tricks and techniques of the left? Yup.

    Can I resume my life and physical science studies, maybe stick in a trade class here and there so I can communicate better and appreciate the difficulty of skills like auto repair? Maybe?

    1. You can. And sharing that makes me feel wonderful. We also nuke electronic communications at most meals. Nothing better than a two hour meal that you want to never end because you love the company around you.

      Thank you. And thank you for every comment.

  7. Good for you, John! The term “force multiplier” is used too often but being grateful for what you have is truly a force multiplier in getting through life.

    Keep up the good work.

  8. Perfesser Wilder,

    Yes.
    Your works help prepare your billions of readers galaxy-wide for ‘the next world’.
    (I think your works significantly resemble a ministry (although this may be unintentional on your part…)…)

    In the meanwhile, if something green and fuzzy falls toward me out of a tree, I call ‘eight in the corner’.

  9. I’m thankful for memories, that even though my parents and siblings are gone (I’m the Last of the Mohicans!) I still can remember them and smile at the stories they gave me. The best part is that now I’m the Elder Statesmen of my family. All the nieces and nephews have to rely on me to tell the stories, so I’m free to go Brian Williams on ’em and just make stuff up.

    Like the time my grandpa who pitched for a local independent baseball team in the early thirties got to face Babe Ruth during one of his cross-country tours. The Babe was hungover, as usual, and Gramps struck him out on three pitches. Got his picture taken, but sadly it was burned in The Fire, dontcha know.

    Happy Thanksgiving, John, and everyone who reads this.

    1. That’s the big regret with having The Mrs. – I can’t tell her how I won all of those Olympic medals. The Babe Ruth story? Perfect. In every way. I don’t know if I like it better as a tall tale or the truth.

      Happy Thanksgiving, Steve.

    1. Tom, it was wonderful, I hope yours was, too. Thank you for the kind words – yet another thing to be grateful for!

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