Category: community

Lucky Penny

We’ve been spending some time in Chattanooga to support our goddaughter as she recovers from surgery.

My wife and I have been taking turns spending time with our goddaughter at the hospital, and her grandparents have been extremely kind, bringing our son on various adventures to the aquarium, shopping, and restaurants.

One afternoon, her grandparents were at the hospital so my wife, son, and I decided to explore downtown and find a fun activity. We parked the car and stepped into downtown Chattanooga.

We lived in downtown Philadelphia for years, so when I use the word “downtown”, it’s technically true. However, it’s like coming from Colorado and hearing people on the East Coast use the word “mountain” to describe the adorable hills they ski down.

But downtown Chattanooga checked a lot of boxes. It had a combination of southern eateries and national chains, obscure shops and traditional retailers, and a blending of locals and tourists on the sidewalks.

We parked the car in a lot and stepped onto the sidewalk, adding ourselves to the mix. We had made it half a block before we saw another feature that Chattanooga had in common with other city centers.

As we passed a storefront, we saw a person in need asking if we had any change we could spare. I awkwardly felt in my pockets and found nothing. I apologized and he nodded the way you would expect a person who has been told the same thing hundreds of times a day would do and we continued down the sidewalk.

After a few more steps, my son stopped and turned back to the man. I watched as my son reached into his pocket and handed something to the man. I didn’t see what my son said, but I did hear the man say, “Thank you, but I can’t take your lucky penny.”

My son held his hand up in the universal “I’m not taking it back; it’s yours now” gesture and stepped back. The man looked at me and then back at my son, a small but genuine smile breaking through the weariness on his face.  “Thank you,” he said again, softer this time.

My gaze shifted to my wife who was nearly in tears. I felt the same way.

As parents, we often look for signs that we’re making the right choices for our children. We want them to have opportunities to be successful and to grow up to be kind, caring individuals. We want them to have better than we did and be better than we were. But we don’t always get that validation, especially when we’re navigating the challenges that come along with their unique needs.

I spend more time assuming that I am making the wrong choices than acknowledging the signs that my son is on the right path. I worry that my trauma will prevent me from being who I need to be for him or that my insecurities will be passed down to him, like my brown hair or love for video games.

Then there are moments like this. Moments that force me to stop. Moments that open my eyes. Moments that show me who he is.

We continued up the block until we found a place to sit. My wife dug into her purse and found a little cash. She gave it to our son, and I followed him up the block to where the man was still seated. My son handed him the folded-up bill and, in return, received a thank you and a handshake. I nodded to the man when he looked at me, and he gave me a look of deep appreciation.

Parenting is a journey filled with doubt, but also these small, brilliant flashes of clarity. Watching my son that day, I saw the kind of person he is becoming. And for a moment, all the worry faded, replaced by gratitude—because if nothing else, he is growing into someone who leads with his heart.

Thankful and Grateful

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States.

While we aren’t the only country that celebrates Thanksgiving, the holiday is widely celebrated in the United States as a time of gratitude and togetherness.

In our household, we have a nightly routine that has evolved over the years. It includes reflecting on something we are grateful for. Even if we are too tired to do the full routine, we never skip our “grateful for.”

That led me to wonder about Thanksgiving being a day about gratitude and the difference between being thankful and grateful. According to the vast library of truth that is the internet, gratitude encompasses both being thankful and being grateful, but even though the terms thankful and grateful are often used interchangeably, they have subtle differences in meaning and emotional nuance:

Thankful

Definition: Being aware of and expressing appreciation for something good that has happened or for a specific benefit received. Thankful is usually tied to a specific moment or event (short-term and outward-focused).
Focus: Often more situational and reactive; tied to specific actions, events, or gestures.
Example:
“I’m thankful for the gift you gave me.”
“She felt thankful for the sunny weather during her picnic.”

Grateful

Definition: A deeper sense of appreciation and acknowledgment, often tied to an enduring or broader sense of thankfulness. Grateful reflects a more profound, ongoing state of appreciation (long-term and inward-focused).
Focus: Goes beyond immediate circumstances and often reflects a heartfelt acknowledgment of a relationship, life situation, or intrinsic value.
Example:
“I’m grateful for having a supportive family.”
“He felt grateful for the lessons he learned from his challenges.”

With my newfound knowledge of the nuances of gratitude, I think about how it applies to the language I use in the context of my son’s epilepsy.

I am thankful that our son has access to medicine that helps reduce his seizures. I am thankful for the doctors and nurses who cared for him during his surgery. And I am thankful he has a friend who helped him catch up when our son returned to school.

I am grateful for the support of his friends and his school. I am grateful to live where he can access specialists and get the care he needs. I am grateful for the lessons I have learned from our son’s challenges.

I’m not sure it’s perfect, but in the end, regardless of the words we use, it’s the feeling that matters. Gratitude improves our overall well-being and strengthens relationships by fostering positive emotions, encouraging mutual appreciation, deepening connections, and helping us focus on the good in ourselves, others, and the world around us.

On a day intended to celebrate gratitude and togetherness, I think that’s what matters, whatever language we use.

Because this post mentions Thanksgiving, it’s also important to be mindful that its origins are tied to events that some Native Americans associate with colonization and the loss of land, culture, and lives. If you’d like to learn more, please read about the National Day of Morning, which is observed by many Native Americans on Thanksgiving and is a time to honor their ancestors and reflect on the historical and ongoing injustices faced by Indigenous peoples due to colonization.

Repeating History

In case you haven’t heard, we have a big election coming up in the United States. To be fair, many countries are seeing their politics follow the same loud, divisive, truth-adjacent bullying trend that was made popular by the success of one of our “candidates” in 2016.

It’s even worse this year.

It’s also terrifying to think this is the world my son will grow up in.

Candidates are being elected and staying in power by peddling fear and hate for the “other.” The easy group to target is immigrants. Falsehoods about their choice of protein and taking over small towns across the country continued to spread long after they were disproved. But it’s a slippery slope to go from immigrants to those who support immigrants to any group that is different or believes differently. History has not been kind to people like my son, for example. People with disabilities were lumped into the “other,” the inferior, and the unworthy of life.

Too many people believe and repeat the blatant lies coming from these candidates, either because they align with the way they want the world to be or because we have lost the ability to think critically, question what we are told, and discover the truth for ourselves. Even when all the data and science support a particular fact, if it goes against what they want to be true, they’ll lean into their doubt. They’ll claim the other side and media are biased for saying the same thing (e.g., facts), and they’ll listen to the pundits in their echo chamber because surfacing “alternative facts” makes them “unbiased.” They think their doubt makes them clever. They’re mistaking cleverness for ignorance.

They think their doubt makes them clever.
They’re mistaking cleverness for ignorance.

Single-issue voters are willing to look the other way and ignore the unpalatable aspects of a candidate as long as the candidate holds (or says they hold) the same position on a specific issue. “Sure, this candidate is a felon, racist, sexist, fascist dictator, but they’re pro-life, which is the only thing that matters.” Worse, they’ll combine their logic with the doubters above and try to justify their position by convincing themselves that the other labels are misunderstood, out of context, or “just politics.” They can’t believe someone who agrees with their position on a key issue could be a monster, even if the candidate only claims to agree to get enough votes to push a much more dystopian, self-serving agenda.

This includes people who believe that our political system is broken and that bringing in an outsider is the way to fix it. If one candidate represents the establishment, regardless of their policies or fitness to lead, they won’t get the vote. Even in a crisis where the country would benefit from someone who understands the system, and even if the non-establishment candidate is unqualified, a criminal, incompetent, and dangerous, they believe that voting for and electing an outsider will make the country better.

When I was in history class, we read about World War II and asked how a country could elect a party and a person who would ultimately commit such atrocities on the world. I couldn’t understand how millions of people could minimize or normalize the extreme rhetoric, the hate, and the violence. It seemed so unfathomable that anyone could look the other way or fully support their country’s direction.

But here we are, nearly a century later, repeating history. People are spreading the idea that our country has lost its way and that we need to go back, that outsiders are a threat to our national identity, and that the other side is what will cause our country’s collapse. Fear, hate, us versus them—it’s the same playbook. And the party and its people are going along with it because it’s more important to win and be in control than to be good and do good. When you’re willing to win at any cost, humanity loses.

It makes me wonder if, 100 years from now, students will sit in a history class wondering how we let this happen. They’ll have the benefits of time and hindsight to see the similarities between parties trying to make their countries great again at any cost because they were too focused on looking back at what they thought their country was instead of looking forward to what it could become.