Giving Thanks

Nov 22, 2022

Thanksgiving is around the corner, so in honor of the holiday, I share reflections of my appreciation towards friends, life, and the world.

I am grateful for all I have — I am undeniably the fortunate one. I get to struggle to grasp human ingenuity, have an opportunity to learn the complex narratives of human effort and our vulnerabilities, engage in critical reflection with thoughtful and wise peers, and most importantly, be lucky enough to be surrounded and interact with beautiful souls, and thus I surely cannot ask for more.

I thank my peers who have shown their insight and views of the domains I am completely foreign to. We have talked about Aristotle to Feyerabend — I am forever grateful for your pivotal role in shaping my intellectual and personal development. The dialectical method very often reveals the inadequacy of each party (including me!), leading them to realize that one has fallen into contradiction that display ignorance. It can easily bring one a sense of inadequacy. However, I am thankful for all my friends that have been courageous enough to admit their gaps in knowledge. I am deeply moved by their attentiveness, open-mindedness, and warmth. These are virtues that I also admire and possess as well.

I am in awe of the feat of human ingenuity and have much gratitude towards my kind friends and professors in my math classes who have guided me to grasp abstract concepts with much patience. I am also thankful for the subject; I am constantly humbled by the creativity of human endeavors. It is so easy to forget how remarkable we are as humans. I am so thankful to be rewarded with a such invaluable opportunity to stop and marvel and celebrate our accumulated knowledge and sheer brilliance. I recognize that I am in a place of great privilege to spend time and have a bounty amount of resources to study mathematics, and I aspire to use this gift of the powerful tool for good. I thank everyone for enriching me with much generosity and warmth. You have reminded me of the importance of incommensurate goods that can be and are so easily neglected and overlooked. They cannot be lexically ordered in any manner — but you all have inspired me to strive to cultivate goodness no matter what.

My recent developments of interests in moral and aesthetic properties, such as justice, beauty, and goodness have arisen from my peers, and I am grateful for that. I have revisited my interest in ancient philosophy from my teenage years. This return to my old love (ha) has reorganized my life’s priority, nudging me towards a direction to pursue more transcendent goods than focusing on utility in inopportune domains.

I am grateful for my housemates. I have lived a nomadic and Spartan lifestyle in standard and rather brutalist dorms most of my life, but thanks to you, I think I have a much clearer picture of what my version of happiness looks like. Your wit and charm, and a killer sense of humor defused tension and filled me with joy. Your love of literature, films, nature, birds (blue jay!), and the humanities have markedly inspired me to live a rich inner life, deeply attuned and perceptive to the life around me. I will forever remember the care and love you have shown me past few months, and thanks for making our home warm and happy. I feel deeply blessed to be here and cohabit in this space with you all.

And I am thankful to all my friends who come over for my dinner parties — nothing can be traded with the warm fuzzy feeling I have around the full table over homemade tomato basil gnocchi and banana bread. I am profoundly thankful for those who embraced my vulnerabilities and accepted my fragility. I would like to express deep appreciation for those who have taken a leap of faith in me. You have read me poems from the Romanticism period, let me cry on your shoulder and console me with warmth, introduced me to a fun romantic comedy show in times of sadness, and admonished me in a mild and gentle but earnest manner. There will never be enough words to convey how much you mean to me, and I will try my hardest to conduct all my behaviors in a way that show greater love and compassion toward you. I am thankful to my lovely younger brother for showing care and love. Your disposition and mine differ greatly — I lean more on the intense and hard-core side and you on the more chill and jolly side (DJ Jamie!), but I deeply appreciate you, and I am so honored to have you as my brother. I respect you a lot, learned quite a lot from you and was surprised by how mature you are, even if you are younger than I am! I owe much debt to my parents. I would describe the love you give me to be tsundere — which often, to be completely frank, perplexes me, but I understand the depth, and there is no word I can say but that I love you. The care you show cannot be put into standard terms, but I will be eternally grateful for what I have received, and I am forever in debt. By the way, I am doing okay, although Algebra is hard. hee. Last but not least, I send love and beg forgiveness to all those who entered and left my life, bearing my inadequacies and deficiencies in character. I am aware of my flaws, or at least — try to be aware, and I am trying hard to learn to be better from them. With all my shortcomings, each one of you has been generous enough to provide me with invaluable lessons and contributed to my flourishing in unique but monumental ways, so I am grateful. Thank you, and I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.