One might have asked this week, what do we have to be thankful for after the past year-and-a-half of exceptionally difficult circumstances?

Well, as my 102-year-old great-aunt replied after being asked how she had been doing, “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

And that’s the thing. Another year under the curse of covid-19, of physical suffering, financial hardship and nation-threatening political divisiveness might have sent us stumbling into the ropes, but we have continued to bounce back for round after round.

Our resilience is pretty remarkable, and we ought to be thankful for that, as we keep getting chances to recognize the mistakes we’ve made and to attempt to correct them. Maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but at least we continue to be given the opportunity to try.

That’s a gift worth noting, because we certainly haven’t done much to earn these opportunities — they just keep coming despite our missteps and misadventures, leaving it up to us to do something with them finally, and, hopefully, sooner rather than later.

We should be thankful for this endless string of second chances. But we do need to start thinking about repaying the debt by engaging in a little more give and take instead of wasting time in the impossible and ridiculously stupid pursuit of one half of us gaining and holding onto dominion over the other half. It’s a mathematical impossibility, so we might as well come to grips with that fact and fix what we can.

Maybe one of these days, we’ll get over ourselves and realize that we’re all in the same foxhole, so to speak, and that we can’t advance if we spend all our time confronting each other instead of what awaits outside.

If we can ever manage to make some progress in that regard, it would be something for which we would be profoundly thankful. Until then, however, we’re grateful for continuously getting another shot at it.

— Stewart Dobson