On Thanksgiving, thank you for the privilege of your time
It's another Thanksgiving. A day where we're grateful for all we have. Gratitude is easy....until it isn't.
It's easy to be grateful for the big things in your life. Your family and friends, having shelter and food, your health, and having enough money to make life comfortable are the big things. If you have those, it doesn't take much to realize how lucky you are and to be grateful. I'm thankful for them every single day.
I don't think of this blog in those terms. Certainly not like I do my children but there's no question that it's something I should be grateful about...and I am.
I've been writing this blog for almost five years. Each week there are between 1,500 and 2,500 people that read something I write. Over those five years, people in more than two hundred countries have read a blog entry. Yeah, I'm really a small fish in a large sea but still all this is mind blowing and I'm always amazed by that. Who would ever think that someone in Iran or a country I never knew existed would be interested in what I have on my mind?
Yet it's easy to take that for granted.
It's easy to get caught up numbers. It's easy to get discouraged when something you really like doesn't reach the amount of readers you were hoping for. As an example, a piece I wrote about Kellyanne Conway will be my most read post of 2017. Damn! That's more than a little disconcerting. I've written quite a few things this year that I liked much better and only reached about forty readers. It's easy to get discouraged about that instead of being grateful for those forty readers.
I've had a recent revelation about this and it took one person in the media to bring me around.
One night I'm watching the NBC Nightly News. It's Saturday and it's anchored by Jose Diaz-Belart. He has a catch phrase which ends all his newscasts....
Thank you for the privilege of your time.
He realizes his viewers can be doing other things besides watching his broadcast. Their time is valuable and he's grateful they are spending a little piece of their day with him. Gratitude!
The little fish in the big media sea realizes this advice should work for him as well. When I see that only forty people read a post instead of saying "damn, only forty read that" or worse, I now say "I'm lucky forty people read that."
Honestly, it's been a long hard road to get to that and also honestly, I don't always think that. Gratitude is always a work in progress.
I don't know how many people are going to read this. It could be 500 to a thousand or even more. It could be fifty or even a little less. It doesn't matter because I'm grateful that every single one of you decided to spend a few minutes of your busy day to read this.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Thank you for the privilege of your time.
Related Post from Thanksgiving 2016: Even at Thanksgiving, giving thanks isn't easy
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