Reflecting on gratitude

I realized, then, how ungrateful I was being. After just over a year of near-normalcy, I’d forgotten that we had spent a year stuck in the confines of our home. I spent two days relegated to my bed, and I was insufferable the entire time.

Thanksgiving was also this week, and while I was preparing this column, I started to think a lot about gratitude. Gratitude was what I was missing. Gratitude forces us to reexamine our reality through a wide-angle lens rather than a zoom lens. Gratitude demands that we abandon the particular in favor of the holistic.

So, scratch everything I wrote in that first paragraph.

First of all, I wasn’t sick with COVID-19 — It was some minor viral infection, manifesting as no more than a low-grade fever and the sniffles.

I was missing two days of soccer practice, but I was forgetting the all-too-important second clause — in my third year on the varsity team. Back when soccer practices consisted of YouTube videos and masked drills, I thought it impossible that I would get the chance to have a high school season. And look where I was now.

I might have been missing two days of journalism class, but during my first year in the program, we couldn’t even put out a print issue because the pandemic meant our class met virtually. And, during the two years since, journalism has become an improbable sanctuary — nothing makes me happier than sending the paper to the printers at 10 p.m. on a Thursday, surrounded by people who care about something as much as I do.

Gratitude can also be an antidote — a small dose of positivity during a time defined by negativity.

Forget the pandemic, for a moment, and consider the current state of politics. It’s scary and messy and foreboding. Politicians who deny the results of an election still dominate the Republican party. Twitter, once a reliable source of breaking news, is a hellscape of misinformation and chaos.

But I, for one, will take the little political victories. We’ve shifted the Overton window drastically, to the point where a mainstream Democratic president enacted student debt relief and pardoned federal offenses for marijuana possession. Our last election was a massive referendum on extremism, proving that swing states and districts can get on board with candidates like Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and John Fetterman. Constituents overwhelmingly voted to protect reproductive rights. Our government is divided, but a splintered Congress will probably do more to fuel democracy and promote compromise than a one-sided Legislature.

I’m not asking you to spend Thanksgiving dreaming up a parade of horribles about how much worse your life could be. And certainly, I would recommend you use your holiday season to think about something other than COVID-19 and the political landscape. But here’s what I’m trying to say: Gratitude — for both the little and big things — is more essential than ever in a time when it is easier than ever to get lost in the depressing and demoralizing. And gratitude won’t just appear miraculously; it demands we constantly scrutinize the world in front of us — not for what is wrong or flawed, but for what is beautiful and possible in the face of those imperfections.

Elise Spenner is a junior at Burlingame High School. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.