The Power of Gratitude

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”

Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving!

Many of you are home, enjoying time with your families (and may not even see this until next week).  A lot of you are hard at work, taking care of our patients or playing a critical support role.  I especially appreciate your service today.

Wherever you are, I hope you will take a quiet moment to feel thankful for all that we have in this world.

This has been a hard, unforgiving year.  Many lives have been lost to COVID-19, including a total of 213 at UMMC.  Our clinical care and support teams have performed heroically under great pressure.  Many in our community have suffered social and economic hardship.  Everyone is tired of this blasted virus. 

And yet we go on.  Deep within each of us, we have been designed to take whatever life hands us and make the best of it.  If we choose to. 

And our mission goes on.  I’ve always thought of myself as fortunate to work for an academic medical center.  Fortunate to be able to make a difference in a student’s life, or in a patient’s.  Fortunate that what we do here matters, and makes the world a better place.  That’s never been more true than in the last 10 months. Academic medical centers were made for this moment.

Recently I came across a quote by the author Melody Beattie that seemed appropriate on this Thanksgiving Day:

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

No matter how bad things get, gratitude helps us look for the silver lining, the bright side.  Gratitude knows that tomorrow is another day, but that there is nothing more important than today. 

On this Thanksgiving Day, I am grateful to be on this journey with you.  We will get through it together.  #UMMCStrong