if you ever meet me in real life, you’ll quickly learn that i love thanksgiving. i plan for it for months. that’s because thanksgiving combines all of my favorite things: food, family, friends and gratitude. and because i travel so much for work, i prefer not to travel for thanksgiving, which means we always host people at our house. sometimes family have traveled in, sometimes friends have, and local friends are always welcome — the more, the merrier. we love having to find ways to pack more people in at the table. sure, cooking a thanksgiving feast is a lot of work, and it can be expensive, too, but it is our way of saying to our loved ones, “thank you for being a part of our lives. we love you and appreciate you.”
we are huge believers that life is so much better and we’re so much happier when we approach things with a spirit of gratitude. when we appreciate our many blessings, and notice those little things that people do for us. when we acknowledge our privilege in all its forms. when we take the time to say “thank you” and really mean it. i can’t tell you how many times i’ve been having a crummy day, but then take a moment to put real intention into saying thank you to someone, and my whole mood perks right up. (more evidence: how happy writing this post is making me feel.)
gratitude is powerful stuff.
but telling people how much we love and appreciate them is not something that most of us do enough, us included. as a society, we value strong, self-reliant people, and it feels weird somehow to admit our vulnerabilities and tell people how much they mean to us, or how much we need them. but what better day than thanksgiving — what we think of as gratitude day — to break out of that pattern and let people know how much they’ve influenced our lives, even in little ways.
as you may have seen from our tweetstorm yesterday, we did a little bit of that, thanking fellow bloggers and YOU, our readers, for making this blog such a gratifying thing for us.
This is gratitude week, friends, and we’ve got a lot of gratitude to unleash! First up, thanks to @rockstarfinance, our biggest referrer!
— Our Next Life (@our_nextlife) November 24, 2015
And thanks to ALL OF YOU for following along with our journey. You motivate us more than you know, and keep those creative juices flowing.
— Our Next Life (@our_nextlife) November 24, 2015
though it might sound trite to say, we’ll say it anyway: we love you guys. seriously. thank you for being a part of our lives, even if we only know each other through screens. it still matters to us, and we’re grateful in a big way.
as for our non-digital friends and family we won’t be spending the day with, we’ll be sending out a flurry of texts, sending some facebook messages and making some calls, just to send the love and share some gratitude. life is too short not to say what we really mean.
some things we know we’ll be thanking people for, in particular:
- for being a great friend despite the distance
- for being a great role model
- for being there for us when our dog died
- for always being willing to listen
- for being a great ski partner
- for sending that kind note
- for being a great teacher all those years ago
- for always making us laugh
- for being a thoughtful mentor
- for making me that gluten-free cake
- for giving great book recommendations
- for being an incredible friend for two decades
some of those thanks are big thanks, and some are little thanks. either way, they matter. each of us plays a role in making the world a better place when we send gratitude out into it.
if you’re not usually one to share your feelings, thanksgiving is the perfect excuse. blame the wine at dinner, or the beers while watching football. blame the mushy speeches others gave around the dinner table about what they’re thankful for. but get those thank yous out there!
and, lest we leave you with the false impression that thanksgiving at our house is just a mushy, new agey lovefest, we’ll end on a very different note: pie. does anything tell my stomach i love it more than pumpkin pie? i think not! ;-)
happy thanksgiving, friends! hope you have a wonderful day spent with people you care about… and with lots and lots of pie!
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