Language Barriers

I’ve been thinking about an Op-Ed piece I read back on Thanksgiving Day. Someone wrote about the difference between feeling grateful and feeling fortunate and I’m not sure I’d ever considered the difference. The piece started out with this guy reminiscing about his mother chiding him to think of starving children in other countries when he didn’t like certain foods and then morphed into a thoughtful discussion about grateful versus fortunate. Words or word combinations can be thought-provoking . I introduced the gratitude versus fortunate concept at Thanksgiving dinner with my family that day and people thought it was an interesting subject but it’s always difficult to stay on track with our large, noisy and interactive family. Twelve of us and four dogs make serious discussions a challenge. (Side note: My son once told me that the main difference between our family and his wife’s is that in hers, each person actually takes a turn talking.) So we didn’t reach any kind of consensus on the words. A couple of days later I was on a walk with my friend from Mexico. He likes to talk about all kinds of different stuff so I brought up the subject with him. He came up with a perfect example to illustrate the difference. It would be like, he said, if you realized you were fortunate to have had the family and life you’ve had but were not necessarily grateful for it. A great explanation. Apparently I need a non-native English speaker to get an insight into my own language.

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