With Thanksgiving coming up, we are all beginning to wonder what exactly we are grateful for this year. It is a time to be thankful and show gratitude.

To me, I am not going to pretend that I am grateful for every moment of every day. (Who is?) My feeling grateful comes in moments of gratitude. My last moment of gratitude was fairly recent.

I went to go buy some soda for my friends and I couldn’t help but feel so grateful for the little family I have at college. My friends here have become my family while I am in Oregon. A year ago everything was different and now everything is different, but good. Those moments of gratitude usually hit me when I least expect it.

Life is crazy and unexpected and being able to acknowledge that you can still be grateful for all the bad and the good is important. Through the bad it’s hard to be grateful, but taking a moment to stop and think about how good life is even though bad things happen. When life is good, it’s easy to be grateful for everything you have, and that feeling comes naturally. With the bad, the feeling has to be learned. Take the bad, acknowledge it, but be grateful. Life is beautiful and there are so many great things happening that all outweigh the bad.

The life I live is a blessing beyond anything I could have dreamed. I have good friends and a great family. I am so blessed to be able to do the things I do, like write and watch Netflix. And I can’t forget going to school, and work and all the boring things I don’t think to be grateful for these days. Yes, I’m even grateful for the boring things because without them I wouldn’t know the beautiful, silly, bad and good. The boring little things are often the big things too. So those boring moments, I am the most grateful for them. They may be boring, but they are important to any life.

So when you’re sitting around waiting for the turkey thinking of how boring it is, be grateful for them. They may seem so mundane but they will probably be what you remember the most.