Skip your blessings

This Thanksgiving, let us all bow our heads before digging into our turkey and fixings and think about what we are most thankful for.

Chances are, for a lot of us, being with our families ranks up there around the top of the list. For some, of course, low introductory APRs, Thirsty Thursdays and the “Twilight” movie might be competitive this year, but the majority of us go for the family.

There is certainly good reason for this choice. For most of us, our families represent home, shelter and a helping hand. But this year, I think it might do us all a little good to be just as thankful for what we don’t have.

Many students here at IU are too far from home to travel back for Thanksgiving. I’ve never been in that predicament, but I witnessed a similar experience in high school.

My family hosted a foreign exchange student who couldn’t see her family for any major holidays for a year. She was disappointed, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking how rewarding the next holiday spent with her family would be.

Perhaps in some strange way, losing out on something is a gift in disguise. Perhaps we’ve forgotten that a loss might be our greatest gain.

I’m no huge Garth Brooks fan, but maybe he was right when he said unanswered prayers are God’s greatest gifts. We all suffer ups and downs and oftentimes are faced with closed doors. All of my fellow Cubs fans know what I’m talking about. But seriously, we undergo bad experiences almost as much as we celebrate good ones.

I’m probably just another naive college student, but I’ve come to believe those bad experiences and losses shape us more than the things that go right.

When we can’t see our families, we savor the next homecoming even more.

When we can’t pass a test, we learn to get off Facebook and study and better our habits as students.

When we can’t make a relationship work, we suffer, yet ultimately look back and realize how much stronger we’ve become in the process.

When we finish reading the seventh Harry Potter book, the mediocre movies become the milestones of our summers.

This Thanksgiving, take a second and be thankful for your failures, for your losses and for any pain you might have suffered in the process. Make light of the situation, maybe even have a laugh (shoutout to my fellow Republicans). But then be grateful for these letdowns. For without losing, we could never fully appreciate triumph.

Besides, without this attitude, it’d be difficult for me to be thankful for yet another “next year.”