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Gratitude

Educators, especially fellow music educators:

Thank you for showing up to work every day. Even when you don't feel great or just don't want to. Thank you for being there for your kids.

Thank you for doing the best you can for the students in your care. Even when it doesn't feel like enough (spoiler alert, it will never feel like it's enough), you are making a positive difference in the lives of young people. Don't forget that.

Thank you for being a light in the darkness, especially in these times in which the darkness seems to be growing more oppressive than ever. Even though you have your own feelings of discouragement, pain, and trauma, you serve as a beacon of hope for your students and you encourage them to do so for others, without even realizing it.

Thank you for dedicating your lives to service. You encourage young people to make music, to make art, to work together to create something bigger than themselves, something beautiful. The opposite of destruction is creation. We can teach our young ones to create or we can teach them to destroy. Thank you for choosing the former.

I am glad we have this holiday. Yes, it is a problematic one...born as it is out of a genocide of Native peoples that we have conveniently been whitewashing for several hundred years now. I don't have a lot of answers for that complexity aside from the fact that I plan to tell my own children the historical truth and real context someday. I do however like that we are encouraged, if ever so briefly, to reflect on what we're thankful for. We live in a very aspirational culture: we are socialized to seek out more, to advance, to accumulate wealth and prestige. I don't necessarily think our aspirational culture is all bad: I have always been a very ambitious person and I probably always will be. The danger of all this, of course, is when we start feeling like we never have enough, and that we are not enough. That's when taking stock and reflecting and being grateful can help move us back from the ledge.

First and foremost, I am grateful for my wife. She amazes and surprises me more each day. She makes we want to be a better human being and she is unbelievably patient with me when I fail in my efforts to be so. We have been through so much together, happy memories and challenging hardships, and through all of it we have started to forge a connection so much deeper than I could have possibly envisioned when we first got married. It has been a true joy over the past year seeing her discover and re-discover things that make her happy and fulfilled and watching her become the person she wants to be. She is my best friend and I am so deeply in love with her, and I am grateful not only for her but also for her happiness.

I am grateful for all of my family, my own family and my wife's family who have taken me in and made me feel welcome. We never see them as often as we would like, but my wife and I love all of our family so much and are grateful for all their support and patience while she's been finishing school. There is no possibly way we would have made it as far as we have in life without them, and I remember the many lessons I have learned from them over the years as I continue on in my journey.

I have so many friends and colleagues, some of whom I interact with on a daily basis and some of whom I haven't seen in years. All of you have given so much to my life and I am grateful for our shared experiences and for what we were to each other in a particular time in our lives or what we are to each other presently. Thank you for your friendship.

I am thankful for my students. They work hard together to create beautiful things. They are willing to be vulnerable at an age when being vulnerable is really, really hard. They try to overcome struggles, treat each other with kindness and live lives of joy and love...and when they fail to achieve these things, they pick themselves up and try again.

I am thankful that I get to be a choir teacher. Not everyone on this earth gets to have their job also be the thing they love to do with a deep passion, and I never take that for granted. It is an incredibly challenging and stressful job at times but I wouldn't give it up to do anything else. I get to teach in a community that supports this notion of kids coming together to create beautiful things. 

And hey, I am thankful for you. Thanks for reading, have a wonderful holiday!


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