Full of Great

A 19th-century engraving of Bacon observing the stars at Oxford, Wikipedia

I’m grateful for hot water. In fact, I’m grateful for warm water. Warm water which I can use in my Waterpik because it feels like a spa day in my mouth. I’m grateful for the Waterpik! That thing has made a lot of dentist visits a whole lot easier. I’m grateful for indoor plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. I’m grateful for many appliances that depend on electricity, especially the one that depends on electricity and indoor plumbing: the dishwasher. There are so many people on this Earth who don't have such basic needs as water you can drink that simply pours out of pipes from the walls, but here we are drinking it, washing ourselves, our clothes and our homes with the stuff. If your parents grew up in a rural, isolated place like my father's, they probably had to take a bucket and fetch water, but our well feels endless and comes right into the house. Electricity also comes from the walls. Apparently, we have magic walls! It gives light, heat or cooling and so many more things.

I'm grateful for work. I've been lucky to have some odd set of skills once in high demand and I've worked steadily throughout my career. I also feel lucky that most of that time the work was kind of fun. Needless to say, I'm grateful that I'm mostly trying to wind down as those skills become less in demand. Work isn't always that purposeful, fulfilling vocation some people have and for most of my career I've worked at companies doing things to make something that enriches someone else. Not every day is fun, that's why they call it "work", but for the most part it's been a challenge with riddles and puzzles and when you're working with like-minded people who also like to solve problems, it actually can be fun.

I'm grateful for my health. It is a weird thing to have a long list of maladies mostly from allergies or from birth that have never really stopped me from doing things I enjoy. I've been lucky to get real joy from running, swimming and biking, which many people think of as the chores you have to do to stay healthy, but I genuinely like doing them. The freedom of biking is something that I hope I enjoy for a long time. The therapeutic meditative act of swimming is also very freeing. Under the water, you can escape from what ails you for a while. From asthma to arthritis, eczema to urticaria, migraines to malformed veins, there's always some challenge but never anything to call the priest about. So many things that are really essential, we often think of more as conveniences. Refrigeration! There's a cabinet in our kitchen that can keep stuff frozen or cold. I didn't even have to dig a cellar in the ground, pack it with hay and buy ice to store in there. I just open the door and boom! Ice cream! Too tired to cut, stack, dry or bring wood into the house to start a fire? Don't worry, press a button, turn a dial and stop when it gets just right. We're surrounded by so many marvels, it's hard to see the world any other way.

Imagine what some would have thought in the 13th century when Roger Bacon is said to have written:

"Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise, cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum impetu inaestimabili, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying bird."

Boats without oarsmen, carriages without horses, a machine that can fly? Did Bacon accidentally eat the wrong mushroom whilst foraging or what? He was a man of science before science.

Speaking of which, I'm grateful for books and the ability to read them. There are still a lot of people that can't. In Canada, the literacy rate is about 99% of the adult population, compared with Afghanistan where it's closer to 37% or almost equally as surprising is that in the U.S. it is around 86% (data published by UNESCO). Not only can I read, but I have access to so many books. I really should stop buying them, they take up so much room. They don't have to take up that much room. I have all the plays of William Shakespeare on my phone. Tell Roger Bacon that and he'd probably say, "Who is William Shakespeare and what is a phone?".

While the modern world has a lot going against it, it has a lot more in its favour. We complain about food prices, but I bought raspberries in November just the other day. Access to indulgent food is so easy, it's practically killing us with obesity. We complain about the price of fuel, but we can travel so easily by flying machines and horseless carriages that the pollution from them is choking the air and burning the planet. We have vaccines to stop once unstoppable diseases, if we could only convince people to take them. While we worry that AI will ruin our public discourse or take our jobs (oh, it will, my own job is endangered by it), it may also help us cure cancer or unlock nuclear fusion. Maybe Roger Bacon wouldn't have been surprised, but I still am. Despite the wars, the division, and the difficulty, some days, of getting out of bed, I find myself with more and more gratitude. I’m grateful for having someone in my life to love and to be loved and for a family, I often forget to be grateful for and who love me anyway! I’m just as grateful for long-lasting friendships that too can be ignored and yet can be returned to without judgement or reproach.

I'm grateful for many things but yeah, I’m so grateful for hot water.