On Gratitude in Times of Darkness

We are living in times when it is easy to forget that there are things to be grateful for.

We are overwhelmed. Some of us have lost income, livelihoods, stability. We've lost contact with friends, family and colleagues. We've been in lock-downs, quarantines and have gone stir crazy with inactivity, as well as, over-activity of little ones, pets, and emotional states, because we are not meant to be confined to closed quarters and narrow spaces.

We've been anguished and anxious. We've been over-tired, and fatigued. We've done more screen time over these past months then most of us intended to do in a life-time. We have been sick with worry, sick with regular germs and sick with the corona germs. Some of us have other sicknesses plaguing us. We've lost friends, neighbors and people in our country as well as on the other side of the world. The world is smaller for the loss, meeker for the vulnerability.

It is easy to forget that it is darkest before the dawn.

In this darkness, I give thanks. A simple and modest thanks. For while I personally have been dealing with my house-bound work and strained productivity, thousands of people all over the world have been working tirelessly: leaving their homes and their families in order to develop the vaccines that will bring us to the next stage of the "new normal". These people have researched and tested, and worked endlessly in sterile labs across the globes, in order to find a vial of opportunity so that we can leave our homes and regain some of what we have lost.

I am grateful for their nimble hands, thinking minds, for the family time that they have lost, so that I - one person on the other side of the world - can be vaccinated. I am grateful for innovation. I am grateful for creative minds. I am grateful for persistence. I am grateful that when necessity knocks, there are brave people who open the door to the unknown.