Every November, we’re reminded to be grateful for what we have. I’m beginning to think the harder—and maybe more important—part is being grateful for what we have while we have it.
I’ve written before about looking at life through the lens of abundance versus scarcity. I don’t always choose abundance, but I’ve learned that gratitude has a way of leading me back there.
Sometimes that means appreciating what is right in front of us. And sometimes it means not waiting for “someday.”
Recently, I took my mom to Europe.
She’s on the other side of 75, her mobility isn’t great, and she wears braces on both knees. It would have been easy to put the trip in the “someday” category.
But I started wondering: What exactly are we waiting for? Waiting wasn’t going to make her knees younger.
So we went.
My mom had four daughters by the time she was 25 and, for as long as I can remember, she worked full-time. She left the house every morning at 6:30, leaving four girls to get themselves out the door. Mornings were a combination of fighting over clothes, searching for missing keys, and our youngest sister yelling, “It’s 7:15!” followed shortly by, “It’s 7:20!” until the rest of us finally got moving.
My mom, meanwhile, was already at work.
She would have given us the shirt off her back—and she often did. So much of what she had went to us.
Maybe that’s why one particular train ride stays with me.
As we made our way from France into the Swiss Alps, the scenery outside the window became almost unreal—mountains, lakes, waterfalls and little villages tucked into impossibly green hillsides. My mom had been taking pictures nonstop when she finally lowered her phone.
“I can put my phone away now,” she said. “I can’t imagine anything more beautiful than what I’ve already seen.”
I looked over at her and thought, This is exactly why we came.
I knew how lucky we were to be there. For so many years, she had been the one getting up early, going to work and taking care of everyone else. And now, somehow, here we were—just the two of us—sitting on a train through Switzerland with nowhere we needed to be, watching the Alps go by.
Her phone was back out about two minutes later.
The trip gave us a lot of time together—the meaningful kind and the completely ridiculous kind.
I learned, for example, that my mother has recently developed a real appreciation for milk.
“I feel like milk hydrates me better than water,” she told me.
I have not researched the science behind this claim.
She particularly likes her milk with cookies, so somewhere between France, Switzerland and Italy, I became responsible for finding both. More than once, I stood in a grocery store using my phone to translate a carton because I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was buying milk or 100% heavy cream
Some of my favorite memories, though, were the ones we never could have planned.
One day, we took a cable car up a mountain to have a late lunch and enjoy the view. While we were eating, a man sitting at the other end of our table asked if we were going to the “yodel-fest” on the other side.
The what?
We had about two hours.
So of course we went.
We headed down the other side of the mountain and found men and women dressed in traditional Swiss clothing, music, crowds and plenty of yodeling. It was completely unplanned and completely worth it.
Until I looked at the time.
We still had to get all the way back up the mountain and over the other side to where we were staying.
By the time we made our way back from the festival, we were literally the last two people to get onto the last cable car back up the mountain. The man working there was already sweeping when he saw us coming. He motioned for us to get in and sternly reminded us, “It’s 5:00!”
We knew.
We climbed in, out of breath and relieved.
We had made it—but we weren’t home yet.
Once we reached the top, we still had to get across to another cable car that would take us down the other side. I thought the system was designed so that if you made that last cable car up, the connecting one wouldn’t leave until everyone had gotten off.
I thought.
I wasn’t certain.
And when there is even a small possibility of stranding your 75-plus-year-old mother in two knee braces on top of a Swiss mountain, “probably” doesn’t feel quite reassuring enough.
So when the doors opened, I took off.
I was literally running down a path through a cow pasture, trying to get to the next cable car before it left, while my mom was making her way behind me as quickly as two bad knees would allow.
And then, right beside the path, I saw the most beautiful cow.
I realize how ridiculous that sounds. I was worried about missing a cable car and potentially stranding my mother on top of a Swiss mountain—and I stopped to take a picture of a cow.
But you should have seen this cow.
With the Alps rising behind her and the cable cars in the distance, she looked like she had been placed there specifically for the photograph.
So I stopped.
I gave myself maybe five seconds, snapped the picture and took off running again. I remember thinking, That is definitely going to be blurry.
It wasn’t.
In fact, it became one of my favorite pictures from the entire trip.
I reached the cable car and immediately told the attendants, “There’s still one more person coming!”
They assured me they would wait, so I stood there anxiously watching the path until my mom finally appeared.
We had made it.
Once again out of breath and so relieved to be there, we sat for another ten minutes.
Apparently, my sprint through the Swiss cow pasture had not been entirely necessary.
Later, I discovered something that made me love the story even more.
My mom had stopped to take a picture of that cow, too.
Somehow, in all our hurry to get where we needed to go, neither of us was willing to miss what was right in front of us.
By the last night of our trip, my mom was done. She had been such a trooper! But she wanted to rest.
We were in Milan solely because we were flying home from there the next morning. I would have happily wandered around for a few hours.
She would not have.
She kindly asked me to go get us a pizza.
So I walked through Milan alone.
It was my first time there. I window-shopped, wandered through the streets and took in a city I hadn’t really planned to see. It was a beautiful evening, I was walking through Milan, and I knew how incredibly fortunate I was to be there.
Of course, I would have loved having my mom beside me.
But instead of thinking about what she couldn’t do that night, I found myself thinking about everything she had done.
France. Switzerland. Italy. Trains. Ferries. Mountains. Cable cars. Cobblestones. An unexpected yodel festival.
All on two bad knees.
She had earned the right to stay in the hotel and wait for pizza.
And somewhere between that train ride into the Swiss Alps, a cow we both stopped to photograph, and my walk through Milan, I think I understood gratitude a little differently.
Gratitude isn’t pretending everything is perfect.
Maybe it’s refusing to let what isn’t perfect become the whole story.
Scarcity says, Look at what we can’t do.
Abundance asks, What can we still do?
We could go.
So we went.
And when I think back on the trip, what I’m most grateful for isn’t Europe.
It’s time with my mom.
Time to talk and laugh. Time to sit beside each other on trains. Time to change plans, almost miss things and discover things we weren’t looking for. Time when I had her undivided attention and she had mine—even if we were both constantly distracted.
And now she’s home talking about another trip. She says she’s going to work on her mobility so she can do even more next time.
I love that.
Maybe gratitude doesn’t just help us appreciate what we have.
Maybe it helps us stop waiting—and see what’s still possible.
She can bring the knee braces.
I’ll bring the cookies.
We’ll find the milk when we get there.
