Latest / Wanzology / Grateful Or Thankful?
Transcript
- Gratitude Or Thankfulness? ”As soon as you finish that drink, say goodbye Say the words and make him cry. Every night gets a little bit colder We both know the summer is over…” Well, not quite. Not quite over yet. How ya doing? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz! Yeah, that little diddy that I quoted at the top was from one of my favorite Seattle local bands ever called The Heats a song, uh, called “Don't Worry, Suzi”, yeah, I really like it! How ya doing? What's good? The dog days of summer are doggin’, and summer is fadin’ fast. Kids will be going back to school and the weather's gonna turn, and all those things that we missedike really short days, cold rain, yeah man, they're all comin’! Yes, they are, but that's another topic for another day. Today, I was pondering the difference between being grateful versus being thankful. They are very, very close. They're not exactly the same, though, they're close synonyms. Thankfulness is often a more immediate automatic reaction to a specific event or kindness and like saying Thank you when someone holds the door open for you. While gratefulness is typically a deeper, more enduring emotional response that involves a broader, more internalized appreciation for what one has. This is an AI overview when I just put in grateful versus thankful into the Google machine and this is one of the things that popped up. What are you grateful for today? What are you thankful for today? Do you know the difference? I was really curious, I actually had never thought of the difference until I actually really started trying to take 'em apart and try to figure out which is one versus which is the other. What I've come to discover is it has a lot to do with timing. You can be thankful in a moment, but grateful for many moments. You can be thankful immediately, but then grateful for that past that you went through to get to the present. You see where I'm going with all this? They're actually pretty close. They're pretty close to being exactly the same thing, but they're not exactly the same thing. Every morning I wake up and take inventory, if all five senses work. I am thankful. Because this is the morning that I have. I don't have any other mornings. I'm only going through the present one, so I am thankful that all five senses work. Now, everything else that happens is a crapshoot. Couldn't tell you what's gonna happen later, but I can tell you this, at the end of the day, I can go back to when I was first thankful and be grateful that I made it through another day because it's already gone, right? I've already made it through the day. That is something that one can be thankful and grateful for. Like I always say, some people just don't make it this far. Wherever you're at, whatever you're doing somewhere, someone has passed and they don't get the opportunity that you have. Which is a really good reason to be thankful and grateful. So what do you do when you know you should be one or the other, but you're not? How often do you take the blessing of life for granted? If you're like me, it happens all the bloody time. Case in point, I have a friend we used to talk like two or three times a week. She would text me or I would text her what's going on and she would tell me all these stories about hanging out with her niece and then would post pictures of her cutting it up and having all this fun with her niece, well she was going through some really challenging medical things and I hadn't heard from her for about a week. So I reached out, “Hey, what's going on? Was just thinking about’cha, hope you're doing well.” Usually, I would get a reply and at most a day, but two days went by and I didn't hear anything, so I didn't really think about it, I figured, she's busy. The last time we’d talked she was really stressin’ out over her living situation and taking care of her mom, and she felt bad because, she didn't feel bad, she was pissed!! She was pissed off because it didn't seem like anybody else in her family was helping her try to figure all this stuff out and take care of her mom. She felt that the stress was taking a toll on her health, and I said, “Ya know, I'm always around, I'm not workinl’, maybe I can help?” “Oh, thank you! That's really nice of you, but that's okay.” Knowing full well, it's not okay. But if that's what someone says, that's what they say. A couple more weeks went by and she came to mind again and went while her contact profile in my little uh, phone, took a screenshot of her picture and posted it in a message that just said, “I really miss your face!!”, three exclamation points!!! This time, four days went by. Outta nowhere, I got a reply from her number and it was her sister telling me that she had unexpectedly passed a week and a half ago. It really kinda took me out. I had to pause. I had to pause for a good two or three minutes to try to process the loss of someone gone like that. I really still kind of don't really know what to do with it. I'm grateful, very grateful to have had her friendship, but I'm also thankful that she didn't have to suffer a long time with what was going on. There were some internal gastro things that were going on with her, and they'd been going on for a long, long, long, long time. She has always been challenged like that. She would never let anybody really know how she felt except me. She would tell me how she felt straight up and I'd have to hold her up and put her together and remind her that, “You've been through a lot of tough stuff. It wasn't easy getting to where you are right now, so I like your chances. And the more I thought about it, the last thing I remember talking to her about was how far she had come since I had met her four years before, and she was challenged back then, she was doing stuff she was scared of not being able to do, especially when it came to taking care of her mom. Her mom's health wasn't that great either. Out of nowhere it seemed like, “Oh, we have to move! For one reason or another, the house that we're renting, we have to leave and I don't know where we're gonna find one!!”, and I don't know this and I don't know that. And Michael, I'm just so scared!!”,and I said, “Look, slow down, slow down, slow down. Life is challenging and every challenge is like a pizza. Don't think so? How do you eat a pizza? Usually people eat it one slice at a time. So when you get the whole big pie, the big 20 inch pizza pie in the box, you open up the box, it's already cut usually, so you just have to decide where you wanna start. Once you get one piece, finish that one piece before you think about getting another one. And how do you actually consume that one piece that you have in your hand? One bite at a time, that's how.” A lot of challenges that I've had. I had to put 'em in that prism. I had to look at my challenges like a pizza, just because the analogy for me was so strong. Even if I picked up a piece that was too big and it's fallen all over my hands, I can put it down, grab a knife and cut it into a smaller piece. Hell, I could cut it up into bite-sized pieces if I really wanted to. Any challenge that I had, I've discovered I can divide and conquer pieces of it and put it all together as a solution. It works on the simple things, and if it can work on simple things, I'm pretty sure it can work on complex big things. Simple thing, broken shoelace. For those of you who haven't graduated to the ‘slip-ons’ and still tie your shoes, I remember the frustration of, oh, I'm in a hurry and I gotta go and you pull, you put a pull TINK and it breaks. You can't like tie it again, you have to like undo all these laces and resize it and put it through the holes, and then when you get it all the way done, then you can tie a bow and then, you know, that's four minutes, three, four minutes gone, that you're never gonna get back. But you know, usually the things that happen in life aren't as, for lack of a better word, tragic, they can be, but they aren't always. Usually the things that happen, you see them coming, they're coming, they make their presence known, and you have an amount of time to decide how to deal with whatever this challenge is. Say you drive to work every day, but you come out one day and you have a flat tire, or maybe you're at work and you get a call from the school and your child is sick and you need to go pick them up, or you've been laid off for a while and you don't know how you're gonna make your mortgage a rent payment. All of these are challenges that people go through. Back in junior high school, they used to have these breaks in the morning and you could pay 25, 30 cents, get a donut, say another 25 cents to get a little carton of milk. So for 50 cents, you could get something to tide you over to lunch. If you didn't have 50 cents, that's no problem, you can just try to borrow a quarter from somebody. What if someone doesn't have a quarter to lend you and the next person doesn't and the next person doesn't? What do you do then? My wonderful Pop, he says, “Which is easier, borrowing a quarter from one person, or five nickels from five people? This was the seventies and a lot of people carried change. You could get a penny from 50 people. You could get a nickel from how many? You guessed it. The saying goes, “There's more than one way to get to Poughkeepsie. N. Y.”, but I, uh, I digress. I miss my friend. I miss my friend, but I am reminded that there is a difference between being thankful and being grateful. There's a difference between being grateful and being thankful. Luckily, if you're listening to this, we still have the opportunity to do both. Try not to sweat the small stuff, but keep in mind, it's all small stuff. Life's challenges are there to test you, but you didn't get to where you are right now at this very moment, by luck, by skill, or by chance, you earned it!! You had to go through some stuff to get to this stuff and you'll have to go through this stuff in order to get to whatever stuff you're on your way to. It's that simple, but not always that easy. I really appreciate you. I am grateful and thankful you've spent a little time with me. Make sure that you take some time to check in on people that you haven't seen or heard from for a while. You can brighten somebody's day just by letting them know you thought about them. I bet you they're not expecting that. I'll be thinking about you between now and next Wednesday. I hope you take care and that life showers you with gratitude and thankfulness. Be good to each other, okay? Be the example of what you wanna see in everybody else. I'll see you next week, later.