I get excited about Thanksgiving because I love stuffing, pumpkin pie, and cranberry sauce in a can. And because this is only time my family ever collectively says prayer for any reason, as we all hold hands and bow our heads around the diner table, I don’t take it very seriously. In fact I'm usually not even paying attention.
Lest you still haven’t gotten the point, I’m lacking in the festive exuberance. Nearly two decades after I stopped tracing my hand to transform into a turkey drawing, I find myself, for the first time, actually giving any though whatsoever to the real meaning of this holiday. Who really are we thanking anyway, Christopher Columbus for displacing Native Americans? Butterball for providing an oven ready bird? I digress.

Yesterday I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway back to Los Angeles. It just might be the most beautiful 400 miles of coastline in the northern hemisphere. Nowhere else can you find the collision of mountains, forest, desert, and ocean. Around 5:08 I pulled off the road to watch the sunset. It was the one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, something so beautiful it actually hurt to look at it; waves crashing against the rocks, the hills behind a golden hue as they catch the last rays of the sun, a pallet of colors in the sky. I sat on the hill taking this all in and realized how lucky I am to be privy to such a thing.
Columbus didn’t have anything to do with this. No man could ever produce anything as spectacular. And justly so, it forced me to consider powers greater than myself. As such a realist and skeptic, I’ve struggled most of my life with the idea of submitting to something or someone I cant see or touch. But the view I had perched up on the hill 300 feet above the surf was as tangible as it gets, and at that moment I know what I will be thankful for this year: to have the liberty to drive six hours from my home and experience nothing short of a natural miracle.

To open my eyes to what is around me and be thankful for the opportunities I have.