Appreciation

This morning I was at my occupational therapist appointment and my OT Molly was working on my right hand – the one on which I’ve been wearing the splint for three-and-a-half weeks. I was whining about the fact that my wrist just doesn’t seem to have gotten any better, and I’m sick of wearing that splint, and it doesn’t seem like I can do anything without feeling some discomfort, and ……. Well, you get the point. I was being a big fat baby.

I’m happy to say that I was able to see what I was doing and stop myself (in other words, it didn’t come down to Molly saying, “Will you please shut up and quit complaining you big fat baby?”). I apologized, saying that I have to really work at reminding myself that I have a wrist injury and not breast cancer (for example).

Molly was nice about it, and told me about a video that someone had sent her entitled “The world is so amazing but nobody’s happy.” A comedian appearing on Conan O’Brien does a four-minute stint about the amazing things that technology has given us, and how it doesn’t matter because we’re still not happy. For example, instead of recognizing the fact that we can fly in an airplane across the entire country in five hours, “sitting in a recliner in the air,” as the comedian says, we complain that the seat doesn’t recline far enough or the plane was delayed by an hour. This video is worth viewing if you are able to do so.

It really is true that we take so much of our wonderful life for granted. My grandparents immigrated from Switzerland on a ship, residing in steerage because that’s all they could afford. It took them a very long time to get here, and my poor grandmother was incredibly seasick the entire way. She would send her five-year-old daughter off alone to get food and milk because she was too sick to do it herself. When they left their families in Switzerland, they knew that it was very unlikely that they would ever see them again because they wouldn’t be able to afford it. In fact, while they did eventually go back to Switzerland for a visit many, many years later, they never did see their parents again.

Now it takes us eight or so hours to get from the United States to Europe. We can fly back and forth over a long weekend. And if we choose to travel on a ship, we have clean quarters and constant food and entertainment.

Travel is just one area that we take for granted. It would be a very long blog if I tried to say everything that I have for which I should be amazed and instead take for granted.

So I will put up with my wrist discomfort and try not to complain.