Thankfully, the nature of pain reminds us of what the ease of pleasure foolishly allows us to forget.

Everything that I hold will eventually be gone. Subsequently, the quality of my life will depend on whether I choose to appreciate those things ‘now’ or wait until ‘then.

What I currently have are the resources that allow me to obtain what I don’t. Therefore, to forget what I ‘do have’ in the pursuit of what I ‘don’t’ is to insure that whatever I don’t have, I won’t have.

Until I realize that it’s all I gift, I can hold all of it and yet receive none of it.

It’s not about some principled debate as to whether I should focus on what I have, or on what I don’t have. Rather, it’s about being thankful that I have the privilege to enjoy the former, and the opportunity to contemplate the latter.

If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.

Oh that we might have the wisdom to stop, lean down and pick up the scattering of things that we’ve so thoughtlessly discarded along the way. For if we were to do so, we would suddenly find ourselves holding the very treasures that we’d been looking for all along.

Being thankful reminds us that if it’s broken it’s an opportunity.

The greatest gifts come in the most tattered wraps.