What Are You Thankful For?

Thanksgiving is this week and it’s been a year filled with a lot of people, moments and opportunities to be grateful for.

On Monday, the co-working space that I work out of held a friendsgiving celebration. In a way it was a celebration of the community that has been built over the last year, and the bond that exists between members of our tight-knit community. Beyond the food that was brought in by various members of the community, everyone was asked to share what they are grateful for. This is of course a time-honored tradition that is practiced at Thanksgiving tables all around the U.S.  

Taking the time to be grateful for all the blessings that have been granted to us is important, not just on Thanksgiving but all throughout the year. Not to sound cliche, though that seems inevitable on a topic that tends to swerve to nostalgia, but every day is an opportunity to express gratitude, and to experience it wholeheartedly.

On a personal note, there is a ridiculously large amount of items on my list of things I happen to be grateful for this year. 

My community, this community of friends, and sometimes work-partners, collaborators, and quasi-family. These are the people who inspire me beyond reason, who motivate me to be my best, while pushing forward on their own goals, and dreams and ambitions. There’s a ridiculous amount of talent in my community, a community that’s filled with creatives, and marketers, designers, coders and technologists. There’s so much to be grateful for when it comes to so many of the people that I interact with on a daily basis. I’m so thankful for them, because they make my life and my knowledge base better every day. 

I’m grateful to my family, and to the people I consider family, which includes a long list of people much too numerous to list.  The people who throughout my life have helped to guide me, and inspire me, and made life so much sweeter just by their presence. I could begin to name the ways in which all these people have contributed to my life, but that would take months and years, so I’ll just say I’m eternally grateful for each and every one of them.  

I’m incredibly grateful for my craft, being a copywriter, the work that I have been able to do, and learn and accomplish by honing in on what I love to do more than anything, which is to help businesses and startups tell their stories, and connect with their customers in a way that is effective and communicative. Whether it’s web copy, social copy, or blog copy, being able to learn and develop my skills as a copywriter this year has been an amazing experience.

This year was kind of a restart button for me, and it felt like for the first time, I could relearn my skills without being in a rush, and learn all of the aspects I had missed the first time. And that was a huge blessing for me, because I had the opportunity to fall-in-love with writing (not only copywriting) all over again. Taking the time to really study and develop your skill-set is amazing, and I feel like I’ve been able to breath new life into my career and my passion projects. 

Honestly, perhaps the most important in this laundry list that could go even longer than anything I could ever write in a week, is my relationship with my faith. Every year, every day this relationship grows and changes and shifts but I feel stronger as a person because I know that G-d is watching over my existence. This is incredibly powerful to me, and it means the world to me to know that I am unconditionally loved and supported by the most powerful being in the world. 

There’s so much to be grateful this year, there’s so much upcoming that I’m excited for, and though I don’t like turkey or stuffing, Thanksgiving is a reminder for me of all of the blessings that I encounter every single day. Maybe that’s the point, maybe it takes a day, in the middle of the week (Thanksgiving is always the 4th Thursday in November), to remind us all what is important. Our families, our friends, our work, our passions, and just the simple act of being able to wake up every day to a new day filled with new possibilities. 

So Happy Thanksgiving to all, and may this year bring you even more blessings to be grateful for!