Thanksgiving

There are so many things for which I am thankful, but upon thinking about this blog, I realized most are conventions. I am thankful for the people I love, friends, family, teachers, and mentors; I am thankful for the things that make me happy every day, the challenges, the excitement, the fascination I have with medicine; I am thankful for my passions and hobbies. But it's more interesting and more important on a day like this to ponder those unusual or seldom-acknowledged things we are thankful for. I am thankful for imagination. I feel like I had such an imagination growing up, that I would create worlds and populate them, that I became obsessed with novels. During medical school and internship, some of that drifted away, but now I have rediscovered it. I am thankful for books and libraries, and the return to cultivating imagination which I had left for so many years. I am thankful for the opportunity to write, and for you, readers, who I invite into my thoughts. I am thankful for the bike commute I take to work, the sunlight and wind and calm rustle of leaves. I am thankful for that warm silence that overtakes me right before I fall asleep. When we think of the things for which we are thankful, we realize most of them are not really things. Possessions do not thrill us. People, experiences, values, stories, and the world we live in are the things that are important, the things that lead us to write, on occasion, awfully cheesy posts.