GRATITUDE, THE GRIND, AND THE HOLIDAY SEASON

By Chance Copeland

I have no concept of time. This is something I discovered several years ago, by accident, in a conversation with my wife about something I’d thought happened a couple of weeks before. She looked at me like I’d grown a horn on my head, raised an eyebrow, and replied simply, “that was four months ago.” I’d shrugged, and in that moment, my fate was sealed as the person in our family who has no sense of when things happened, when they will happen, or even how long five minutes feels.

I say all of that to say this: the holidays snuck up on me this year, and it was approximately three weeks ago (okay, it could have been five weeks or two months ago) that my wife also reminded me our wish lists for the holidays were “due” to our family on November 1st. Today, several weeks later, I have exactly one thing on my list: a blinking cursor. Because I tend to view nothing as a unique experience, I’m willing to guess that those reading this have something (or several somethings) on their lists as well as we approach the holidays: things to do around the house, things to finish up at work, gifts to buy for loved ones, plans to make for celebrations. For me, the days blur together, are somehow unbelievably short and insanely long all at once, and usually end with a longer list of “to-do’s” than they began with. Then, when we add to these lists the pressures we face at work, in our personal lives, and in awkward dinner-table conversation at family holiday dinners, it comes as no surprise that many of us feel more like Ebenezer Scrooge than Santa Claus. Life is a grind, even when everything goes well. But when it doesn’t go well, that grind can sometimes feel like a nightmare it’s hard to wake up from. So, how do we wake up? How do we honor the hard moments, validate our exhaustion, get our work done, and still show up for the family dinner? The answer is so simple it seems ridiculous: gratitude.