What am I thankful for?

Paper lanterns are surprisingly deep objects. Flattened out, they take the form of a few basic geometric shapes. Yet when you open them up they reveal so many more intricacies; patterns which reflect light in strange, beautiful ways, making me wonder how an item that looked so flat and straightforward could become something so complex. Origami is another skill, taking something banal and creating angles, images and contortions into another thing altogether. That’s what this question is: something that is – on the face of it – a standard question, meant to give some hindsight into an individual. However, when it comes down to answering it, the response is not as simple.

This is not meant to come across as some emo moment. I’m not a dark, brooding kid who feels everything in life is unfair and only I have figured out what life is. There are things I do feel grateful for: a roof over my head for one, being married, a pet .. but these are just the cuts made for the patterns on the lantern. None of these things really dip into the crevasse of the question of what it is to be truly thankful for. For me, being thankful is more about the absence of something.

My example: I am thankful to not be alone. For all my introverted characteristics, it’s strange to admit life is better when shared. Sure, life alone has many benefits: no complaints over a tea being too milky or being able to schedule life around myself. However, the feeling of being truly lonely (whilst not being something to be feared) is one of stagnation – of progress and repetition without feedback. Someone to reflect on what you do in life. Being alone to me is a melancholia that is both freeing yet completely empty.

So, for now the answer is to have at least one other person to ward away isolation. To at least know that, out there, the loneliness is at least shared and at most starved. Like paper lanterns floating away on the breeze together, maybe not conscious of the others, but from an observational standpoint they are never alone. Even in my loneliest days there will always be that knowledge and, accepting this, will at least let me continue to seek out a future. That’s what I feel I am grateful for at the moment.