Grateful Mindset

It has been a great year. I am grateful for many things and many people. Let me just recount a few. I will start with something small.
I am thankful for a stranger whose car I bumped on highway 101. It was a sunny afternoon during the typical busy commute hour. The traffic was stop-and-go. The CD I was listening just ended, so I was fiddling around to find the next one. Somehow, the next disc was particularly difficult to fish out of its container and I have to turn and look at the thing. Oh, well, that is when I hear a thump. I just realized that I have hit someone in front of me and it is definitely my fault for no watching the road. “Great,” I said to myself, “now I have to face an angry driver and be late for picking up the kids.” I sat that for a moment before getting out the car. It turned out that there was not any serious damage because the cars were moving very slow. When the lady driver came out of the car, I asked whether she was hurt. She answered “no.” She walked to the back of her car and looked at her back bumper. I asked her whether she needed my insurance information, she grinned and said, “forget about it.” “Huh, she is not angry, and she does not even want my insurance information. This is a lot better than I was expecting.” I thought to myself, and then said, “Are you sure?” She said that she was sure. What can I say? I was relieved to hear that. I smiled and said to her, “Thanks. You are so kind.” She got back in her car and drove away. In a minute, my mode went from dread to relief; I could not express how happy I felt about the outcome that I did not even remember to ask for her name. As I was driving home, I couldn’t help myself but to repeat the words “Thank you.”
At my work place, this has been a tough year because the funding for a number of projects has run out. This is not unique to our research group, because the overall funding level has gone down. The situation is that we will be forced to fire people if the situation does not improve. The organization I am in has a rule based on years of service – the newest staff is to be let go first. I was personally involved in working with three of the newest members in our group. I was clearly concerned. However, my manager was a few steps ahead of me on this matter. He has talked to these guys already and they have made plans way before I realized. It turned out that all three of them got decent jobs in universities. I am very happy that they all have good jobs and more importantly, I am grateful for a boss who plans.
The struggle to get additional funding for our group has been particularly difficult this year. I am aware of very contentious meetings that my group lead has to attend, and insidious underhanded moves against some of my colleagues. I am grateful that he is taking care of those issues so that I can continue to have a job. Thanks, boss.

What I am thankful for this year

"Make lists of things for which you're grateful in your life." While I was trying to find something to listen in a car, I heard this brief statement. Since this is the Thanksgiving holiday, it seems to be the perfect time for me to make such a list. I will start from the things of immediate concern to those with broader consequences.

I am very grateful that I can see the end of the tunnel for the work that seemed to consume endless hours during the last couple of weeks. The work requires a program to handle some searching operations on a toroidal mesh used to simulate magnetic confinement for nuclear fusion (more background information about the project). This program contains some intricate computation involving the coordinates on the torus. It has been causing headache also because I am running against a deadline to present the results at a progress meeting. Well, I saw the end of the tunnel in the afternoon of the Thanksgiving day. As I am writing this piece, my laptop is humming away to crack through the suit of tests to verify the correctness of the program. This thing has prevented me from making any planes for this weekend in advance, now I can at least see the end of it -- what a relief.

Talking about work, I am grateful that I have a job. Ever since graduating from college, I was able to support myself through various jobs, except for a brief period of under-employment during grad school. I still remember the horror I felt. Thank God that I don't have to feel like that today. More importantly, I get to work with decent people, colleagues who care about our work and bosses who care about employees. I am also very happy that this job has brought me a roof over my head, cars to drive us around, and all the strange gadgets that I could not image when I was growing up.

I am grateful for my family. I thank my parents for taking good care of my kids. I used to be ashamed to admit this because it seemed to be not the American thing to do. The fact is that having the grandparents watching the kids is definitely better than having strangers watching them. That is good enough for me! I am very grateful that the kids are doing fine in school. Their school was closed for a few days earlier in the week so the teachers can have one-on-one meetings with the parents. I am very happy to hear both of their teachers saying good things about them. They can be naughty like all kids do sometimes, but they are on the right trajectories, which is what really counts.

I am grateful for the California sun shine. I spent many years in Midwestern states. After I moved to California to this current job, I often complained about not having a white Christmas. Recently, I have learned to enjoy the sun shine and even learned to live with the threat of earthquake. A friend of mine has a relative who works on earthquake prediction, once in a while he give me a sneak peek at the charts measuring the tectonic stresses and share with me the odds of coming earthquakes. Goodness gracious, nothing serious has come yet. I truly thank God for this peaceful year in California.

Col 3:15 be ye thankful.

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• "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others." - Marcus Cicero
  
  
• Here are some writings on the connection between happiness and gratitude:
  
  • It All Starts With Gratitude
    
  • You are happier by being grateful
    
  • Giving thanks year round leads to better health, perspective
    
  
  
• A self-test of gratitude