The Measure of Gratitude
The Measure of Gratitude
We spend one month out of the year being reminded to give thanks, but is that really what we’re doing anymore? Somewhere along the line, the meaning has shifted. Thanksgiving used to be a time when people gathered around a table, looked one another in the eye, and spoke their gratitude aloud. They named the blessings, the hardships survived, the people who made it through with them.
Now, it feels like Thanksgiving has become the prelude to Christmas sales. Gratitude ends where the store lines begin, I guess. Where we once sat down at a fully loaded dinner table, we now form a buffet line and sink into comfortable sofas and chairs, phone in one hand and a fork in the other. Instead of looking family in the eye, our eyes are now trained on our phones and on the big screen TV broadcasting the big game. Quiet reflection has turned into nothing more than a post-meal nap. The thanks we give are less spoken and more assumed, like background noise drowned out by the buzz of retail anticipation.
But real gratitude, the kind that humbles you, doesn’t require a single date or a feast. It comes quietly, in those in-between moments when you’re driving home and the overcast sky suddenly opens up, or when you realize you’ve survived yet another year you thought would break you.
That’s partly why I don’t incorporate holidays into my stories. Gratitude, in my worlds, doesn’t need a table or a turkey or a festively ornate tree. It lives in the silence after heartbreak, in forgiveness, in grace, in faith that endures without spectacle. It’s found in the whispered thank-you’s that nobody hears.
Who Are We Thankful To?
I think about this question often. Not only what we’re thankful for, but to whom the thanks belongs. We constantly thank people for favors, for kindness, for being there when we needed them, but deeper gratitude goes beyond people and words. It’s the feeling you get when you wake up from a nightmare in a cold sweat, when you realize you’ve been spared. When you’ve survived. That’s when gratitude stops being performative and becomes spiritual.
Gratitude, for me, has never been about abundance. It’s been about endurance. About the quiet acknowledgment that somehow, despite everything, I’m still here. The people who’ve been through storms in life know what I mean. The thankfulness that comes not from having more, but from realizing how much you’ve already been given.
The Quiet Kind of Thanks
Maybe gratitude isn’t supposed to be announced. Maybe it’s meant to be whispered, tucked into the spaces between heartbreak and healing. Maybe it’s the silence after a storm, the breath you take when you realize you’re still alive to see another sunrise.
The holidays will pass, as they always do, wrapped in noise and glitter and comfort food. But gratitude, real gratitude outlives the season. It lives in the quiet corners of our hearts, where no one goes looking.
And maybe that’s where it’s supposed to stay.
