Mixing Gratitude and Metaphors

November 25, 2020

If you think you're entitled to something, there is no joy in actually receiving it, and little incentive to give thanks when you do.

I started my professional life with high expectations for myself: To the best of my ability, I would fling myself passionately into whatever work I decided to do, uphold my obligations, and dedicate myself to being better when I come up short. But based on my own growing-up experience, I had low—frankly, gloomy—expectations for others doing the same. That may have started as a defense mechanism against being let down, but those low expectations have, almost paradoxically, turned into endless opportunities for feeling delight. I keep meeting regular people whose drive to be of value and service to the world spurs them to do and make and be things that inspire me every day. I can imagine what it would be like to feel entitled to their value and service, and that's a fairly joyless existence. I prefer delight, and its sister experience, gratitude.

This year, I have had endless opportunities to be grateful to the KidsOutAndAbout.com team members who are keeping us chugging along healthily during the pandemic. To our VP of operations, June Santini, who has been with me from the very start of our expansion out of our home city of Rochester, NY over a decade ago, to our editorial / communications team—Katie Beltramo, Helena Robin, Carol White Llewellyn, and Claire MacAulay; our webmaster Mandy Baldwin; our social media coordinators Pattie Hill and Meg Brunson; our data team—Mindy Mangan, Michelle van der Linden, Evelyn Cole, and Nikki Lawrence; our sales team—Amy Riccardella, Robin Harisis, Michael Galvin, and Alecia Romano; our programming team—Patrick Pitman and Tamas Vas; and our accounting support team, Jane Rabadi and Megan Goerl. They all may technically be ordinary people, but they don't feel ordinary to me, and I wanted to affirm publicly how integral each team member has been to our success. I hope I've held up my end of the gratitude equation while steering this 2020 bus on the whiplash-inducing COVID Expressway (and, apparently, frantically mixing metaphors like they're going out of style).

As I sit down at our sparsely-populated Thanksgiving table tomorrow, I'll be thinking of all the people who are making gradually straightening the path, flattening the curve, and paving the way to a brighter future...and trying to think up new words to describe it all. If you encounter any better metaphors so we don't have to recycle 2020's into 2021, I'd be delighted if you'd send them along.

Happy Thanksgiving.

—Deb