thankful
I am thankful for the pain and suffering because of how it forces me to consciousness. I am thankful for my body for keeping me alive. I am thankful for the respiratory system that breathes life in me. I am thankful for the eyes and sensory organs that perceive the world. I am thankful for the hearts that beat blood in my heart. I am thankful for my immune system that fights and protects the body 24/7. I am thankful for the brain with its cognition, metacognition, and memory abilities. I am thankful for my fingers and hands. I am thankful for the feet that has to touch the ground and lets me move about. I am thankful for this body that works 24/7 without needing any credit. I am thankful for the other thousands perhaps millions of things my body is doing for me that I'm too dumb and ignorant to recognize. I am thankful for my health. I am thankful for my torn ACLs to show me the significance of my knees. I am thankful for the bipolar disorder that showed me that I was wrong and lying to myself. I am thankful for my invisible disability that makes me to categorically alien to most people. I am thankful for my ability to feel emotions - all of them happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy. I am thankful for my ability to feel negative emotions like fear and anxiety to help prevent the body from life threatening situations.
I am thankful for the world in which I was born into. I am thankful for the genes my parents gave me and the country they brought me to for my future. I am thankful to have traumatized parents who did their best. I am thankful to have parents who forced me to break the traumatizing chain. I am a thankful for my mom and dad who still loved me and was there for me even when I was a sinful, wretched sinner. I am thankful for my teachers and friends and lovers and bosses and coworkers. I am thankful for all who gave me a reason to live while I didn't have one. I am thankful for my brother who showed me what having a heart and soul really means. I am thankful for the death of my brother that left a hole in my heart that cannot be mended. I am thankful for losing the person who loved and understood me in a way no one ever has. I am thankful for the strangers who cared about me. I am thankful for the strangers and co-workers who didn't quite care about me, but were polite about it. I am thankful for the humans who give me a hard time because they have to acknowledge me. I am thankful for the humans who see the human in me and who bring their light. I am thankful for the coworkers who brought my mistakes and deficiencies to the light. I am thankful for my rivals who brought my dark side I wasn’t aware of - to the light. I am thankful for the compassionate who assured me I was not in the wrong when I wasn’t. I’m thankful for the weirdos, the loners, the broken, the neurodivergent, and the rebels who have accepted me and pointed me back to myself. I am thankful for my grandma who brought me fruits and tried to talk to me despite our total lack of any relationship. I am thankful to the fellow seekers and mentors who lovingly or at least, patiently listen to me even in my arrogance and ignorance. I am thankful for my wife who grounds and humbles me and my son who shows me what purity, innocence, love, and presence truly is. I am thankful for wife and son for motivating me not to be a Charles Bukowski or Charles Manson. I am thankful for the many many people whom I have never seen or heard who have built the world around me I take for granted. I am thankful for the hard working anonymous humans who broke their backs have built the grounds I walk and the bridges I drive on. I am thankful for the electricity that warms my son’s feet and the water that comes through my pipes. I am thankful for those who invented a language that I can use to think, read, and write this with. I am thankful for the doctors who have kept me alive despite my life threatening illnesses. I am thankful for the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of forgotten men who have died to give me the freedom of speech that would have killed me in other countries. I'm thankful for the millions and billions of humans before me who have died so their genes would be selected out before it came to me. I am thankful for the investors, scientists, and engineers far smarter than I am to figure out how to builds transistors that can fit a pocket device or launch satellites into space. I am thankful for women like my mom who prayed for my good fortune while taking care of the house and my needs like a servant, everyday. I am thankful for a mom who believed I would succeed in my career and ambitions well before I did. I am thankful for the men like my father who is humble enough to clean beds at a hotel to feed our family for decades at the cost of his health, sleep, and sanity. I am thankful for a dad who would not buy an electric toothbrush for himself, but wants to buy me a house. I’m thankful for the women like my grandma who have more wisdom and courage than her speaking skills who tried to tell me things that are for my own interests even if she couldn’t articulate it. I am thankful for the butchers who slaughtered and killed the animals so my hands could be clean. I'm thankful for the many unfortunate children and adults who work tirelessly for pennies and without complaints to make my overpriced clothing. I am thankful for the saints and sages and poets and artists who have risked ostrasization and death and sacrificed luxury and comfort to express the pointers to the untruths and truths I have searched all my life. I'm thankful for the works of such folks who bring tears to these eyes.
I am thankful for the countless animals - all with emotions and pain and pleasure and and need to live like me - who have been killed for my survival and mere pleasure. I am thankful for all the trees who take my waste gases and give me oxygen tirelessly. I am thankful for the bees who pollinate flowers and form the foundation of the ecosystem that is responsible for most of the vegetation and animals on the planet. I am thankful to the horses who have taught me what no humans did. I am thankful to the cats who showed me my shadow long before I knew what that meant. I am thankful for all the plants - vegetables and their fruits which I have consumed. I am thankful for the bacteria in my stomach which helps digest my food. I am thankful for the antagonistic bacteria who were strong enough to make my immune system stronger but not strong enough to kill me. I am thankful that water freezes to the top instead of the bottom or the oceans would have froze out and life in sea wouldn't have even started and likely humans couldn't have existed. I am thankful for the sun that radiates energy to the plants which give birth to all the living things that I depend on and warm up the planet to a livable temperature. I am thankful that the earth is close enough to revolve around the sun for its benefits but does not collapse into it due to gravity. I am thankful for the intelligence of so much that has existed before I was born and that works 24/7 without my involvement and will continue to work effortlessly long after I'm dead. I'm thankful for the infinite layers and complexity in breadth and depth that occurs in the background and without me that keeps the universe working. I am thankful that I am not so foolish as to think I'm not a fool.
I'm so thankful that there is God and existence - that there is something rather than nothing. I am thankful that I have lived. I don't know how many times I have lived and how many more times I will live. I am thankful for my true God - the one that animates me. The one that I am nothing without and whose attention I am always demanding. Even being able to really be thankful must use awareness. I cannot even genuinely thank you without your power.
I am thankful to all the people who have helped me to orient myself closer to my true self. I am also thankful for all the people who have oriented me farther from my true self to help me know what my true self isn’t. I am thankful for the void for how could there be something if there is no lack of it. I am thankful of death because it allows me to appreciate life. I am thankful of fear because it has lead me to love. I am thankful for this moment because there is nothing else. I am thankful for this because there is nowhere else. I am thankful for now because there is no other time. I am thankful for you because without you, there is no me. I am thankful for me because without me, there is no you. I am thankful of being thankful and thankful of not being thankful because without thankfulness I can’t have thankfulness. So thank you, thank you God, thank you me, thank you Being, thank you Void, thank you Death, thank you life, thank you Fear, and thank you Love.