Life Is Good: A Perspective on Gratitude
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
Informed by war, heritage and her own family life, a mother reflects on her good fortune while respecting the lives that paved the way for her
—
When my kids were young, I was always reminding them that they needed to put their “problems” in the proper perspective. What was I really telling them? I was saying that they needed to be more appreciative of their lives—and what they had—spiritually and materialistically. I usually said this when they were acting like spoiled children—for example, when my fourteen-year-old said that she needed new clothes after we’d just gone clothes shopping for her a month earlier.
When I was young, my dad was an expert at putting my life in the proper perspective for me. He shared stories of growing up during World War II in Germany and surviving the Holocaust. He spoke about how in his early teens he was sent to a concentration camp. He ate only food scraps and at nightfall collapsed on the only things there were to sleep on—wooden barracks with hundreds of other prisoners. He was grateful for his job in the kitchen peeling potatoes, because he always had food. Once he showed me the scar on his forehead inflicted upon him by Nazi soldiers when they found out he’d taken too much peel off the potatoes so he could toss it to his hungry friends in the barracks.
After the war he couldn’t stand the sight of red meat because it
