If We Can’t Find Something To Be Grateful For, Look Harder

A couple of weeks ago I went out to pick up some food I had ordered online from Panda Express. Now, there is a Panda Express less than a mile from my house, right on the corner of two major roads, but as both of those roads are all torn up due to construction, I had to flip like three u-turns just to get into an adjacent parking lot that I still had to walk over gravel to get into the restaurant. And then, despite spending fifteen extra minutes to go less than a mile, they hadn’t even started on my online order, and in fact, did not get to it until they had served the three other patrons, so that I might have gotten my food slightly faster if I hadn’t bothered ordering online. I should say that while this whole frustrating scenario was playing out, I was listening to this interview of Yeonmi Park, a woman who didn’t so much escape North Korea as get transported to China by human traffickers and sold as a slave. She described her childhood in North Korea where people would starve to death in the spring just waiting for anything edible to grow. She would eat bugs, flowers, rats. And I was ready to throw a big fit because it took twenty extra minutes for me to get my food. As we approach Thanksgiving, it can be helpful to broaden our perspective. When considering the seven plus billion people on this planet, if you make more than thirty-four thousand dollars a year, then you’re actually in the top one percent wealthiest people not just right now but throughout history. It’s estimated that the majority of people throughout history have tried to survive on something like two dollars a month. I don’t want to make it seem like we’re not allowed to acknowledge the pain that we feel from “First World Problems”, but if we are choosing to feel grateful for what we have and struggling to do so, then we can consider the many ways in which so many of our brothers and sisters are so much worse off than we are. And if we’re going through hell and find it hard to believe that others are suffering worse than we are, then we can embrace the fact that our horrible circumstances might just inspire a little gratitude in those who seem to be better off than we are. This Yeonmi Park that I mentioned has done a lot of advocacy work for people in North Korea and she said that after hearing some of the stories of other people who had it worse off than her, all she could say is that she was so fortunate, that she felt like Paris Hilton or something compared to what these other people went through. A woman who grew up literally starving all of the time, who had to sell her own mother as a slave because she couldn’t afford to feed her, who grew up in a regime where they didn’t even have a word for freedom or even singular personal pronouns like “I” or “me”, she was so grateful that she couldn’t even believe how fortunate she was compared to others who were worse off than her. If we can’t find anything to be grateful for, then we are not looking hard enough.