Thanksgiving is rolling around again. For most of us, that means (possibly) running to burn off all the turkey we’re going to eat later, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, scrambling to do some last-minute cleaning of the house, inviting people over, and of course eating Thanksgiving dinner and dessert. All of those are good things, but we ought to also use this holiday for its namesake purpose: giving thanks. Whether that’s to the deity(ies) you worship, to existence itself, or to earthly factors, we all owe thanks, for we have all been greatly blessed in ways we don’t even think about. For example….'

1. Existing

Think about it: Your parents’ meeting was unlikely. Then, they had to talk again, develop a long-term relationship, and have that relationship develop to the point where it turned into offspring. Even after that point, the number of eggs in a woman’s body and the number of sperm in a man’s body--which are all genetically unique--is so vast that the odds of one particular egg fusing with one particular sperm are 1 in 400 quadrillions. But even these calculations assume that all your ancestors survived to reproduce, and that the right sperm met the right egg for each and every one of them over 150,000 generations--all extremely unlikely events. When all those odds are multiplied together, the odds of your being born are about one in 102,685,000. (For comparison, there are about 1080 atoms in the known universe). So even the fact that you exist is a miracle. Not to mention the fact that your existence requires….

2. Your Family

No one can exist except through his or her parents. While some of us are unfortunately cut off from one or both parents, their presence in the home is surely a blessing for those of us who have them. Families with mothers and fathers present are more likely to produce children who succeed in school, grow up with means, and stay on the right side of the law, and a new study has shown that strong families are correlated with good physical health as well. Families also provide us with an intangible yet infinitely valuable good: love. For those of us with good parents, to whom else can we go and be assured of warmth and comfort? With whom else do we have an automatic friendship?

3. Your Friends

You may only have an automatic friendship with your family, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have friendships with anyone else--and indeed, most of us do. Our friends are the people we talk to about what’s going on, the ones who laugh and cry with us, the ones who accompany us to everything fun. They are our eternally loyal companions, enriching everything just by being present. What would we do without them? They are the ears we vent to about all our first world problems, including…

4. Your Schoolwork/Office Work

I completely understand that paperwork is annoying. I’ve suffered through hours of homework myself. But at least we’re pushing paper rather than pushing a hoe. Many of the world’s poor must grow their own food, using little more than hand tools, just to survive. They would be grateful for multivariable calculus problems, because knowing higher level math is a chance to get a well-paying job and escape poverty. They would kill for the chance to do paperwork all day, sparing the strength of their bodies, rather than breaking their backs in the fields or industrial sites all day. I’m not saying we have to love our schoolwork or jobs; they are a pain. What I’m saying is that even in annoyances, we can find blessings.

Always and everywhere, even in things that seem like curses, we can find blessings. Once we learn to look, we can learn to be more grateful, more humble (realizing that we didn’t earn much of what we have), and more generous in paying it forward to others. And isn’t that how we make the world a better place? So this Thanksgiving Day, have fun, but remember to give thanks.