Thankfulness has been a troublesome subject. Not in that I find it difficult to identify reasons for thankfulness in my daily life but rather in how to express the thankfulness that I hold in ways that feel adequate to the emotion I am experiencing.
How do you properly thank someone who was an emotional rock for you when you had numerous panic attacks and homesickness in the middle of the Kenyan highlands? Or the friends who encouraged you, and listened to you through the journey of discovering the freedom of being yourself? Or the woman who through living her life taught you what sacrifice, true love, and conviction looks like?
None of the thankfulness I feel is the same. Some even have a sense of bitterness within them. I find it particularly easy to place blanket statements of thankfulness on obvious things; i.e. I'm thankful for my family, my job, my friends etc. However, to wrestle with thankfulness for the struggles is an even more arduous task. For example, finding thankfulness for a relationship that initially left you broken and lost; but showed you strength and forgiveness you never thought you possessed. Or for having everything you had been working for taken away from you and having to find a new direction in life because someone else decided the potential money you had was more important then your well-being.
Being in the moment and discovering thankfulness for things often taken for granted is difficult to practice. I've become more cognizant of these sort of things as of late, especially because of the work I do. To be thankful for two feet to stand on. Or that I won the genetic lottery and didn't leave the womb with congenital abnormalities to battle with the rest of my life. It can be difficult to be cognizant and thankful while not pitying at the same time.
