As the Americans recover from their Thanksgiving dinners, I am thankful that today is a public holiday for me as Muslims celebrate Hari Raya Aidiladha. I am thankful for the long weekend and I am thankful that I have far more to be thankful for than I can possibly list. And believe me, I am very good at making lists.
When I was growing up, my father taught me to be grateful for everything I had and my mother taught me the importance of saying please and thank you. It’s a habit (lifestyle?) I hope to pass on to my kid. To my mother, saying please and thank you was probably more about good manners but to me, it’s also about respect. I say please and thank you to everyone because I think everyone deserves respect – from my boss to my maid to the guy who collects my garbage – and this is my small way of showing it on a regular basis.
One of the traits that I admire the most in people isn’t their determination or their talent although those are wonderful things to emulate and to have, it is the ability to treat everybody with respect and to treat everybody the same. I admire it because I don’t see it very often and I wish I could say I look at every single person equally but the truth is, sometimes I don’t. I am distracted by status, race, age, appearance… the many things that consciously or unconsciously influence how we behave towards other people. So I’m working on it and I probably will for a long time.
Oh dear and this was supposed to be a post about being thankful. You know all those stories about starving African children that parents always repeat when their kids won’t finish their food? Well, it worked on me. Whining and complaining was something my father did not look kindly upon. Don’t like your dinner? Think about all the starving children who don’t even have food to eat. Whining about homework? You should be so lucky to have the opportunity to go to school and get a good education.
You’d think this sort of thing repeated over, I don’t know, 20 years would have made me quite immune to it, but instead, it’s stuck. I find myself saying the same thing on occasion to my youngest siblings and sounding about 40 years old in the process. I’ll probably say the same thing to my kid. But I really think being grateful is so important. It puts things into perspective and shows me what a whiny brat I’m being.
So today, I’m going to take several moments to remember all the things I’m thankful for. From this laptop I’m tapping away on to my husband who still refuses to get up even though it’s noon. From the baby that’s kicking inside of me to our families who I know might spend the next 20 years telling us how to bring him or her up. For my many, many blessings, I am grateful.
