A Year of Gratitude – July 4, 2024

Today is Independence Day, so I will focus on the gratitude I have for the freedoms I enjoy. I was fortunate to be granted many of them at birth. I didn’t do anything to earn them, they were imparted on me based on geography.

The freedom to speak freely, worship in the manner of my choosing, and to be myself were freedoms fought for and won long before I was born. I owe a debt of gratitude to each person who sacrificed and put themselves at risk to guarantee those freedoms.

Because I have lived my entire life with those freedoms, it can be difficult to put them into context. They feel like events that happened so very long ago. Yet some of them aren’t so distant at all.

Take the right to vote, the freedom to participate in elections. That right wasn’t granted to women until 1920. Even then, it wasn’t bestowed upon all women.

That was barely 100 years ago. For me, that means I only have to go back two or three generations in my family tree to land upon a woman who didn’t have that same right. My maternal grandmother was born two years before women got the right to vote. That’s not so very long ago.

It can be easy to take for granted something that seems like it can’t be taken away, something etched in stone. But freedom can always be taken away. Perhaps that is why we treasure it so much, why we celebrate it.

No matter the reason, freedom is worth celebrating and being mindful of and grateful for. I’m grateful for the freedom I exercise each day and mindful of how precious it is, not just today, but every day.

Freedom, like most great things, is better when it is shared, when there is more than enough to go around. At least, that’s how I see it. I’d like to welcome more people into the fold; to extend the freedoms I hold dear to more people so that they can enjoy them.

When I cast my ballot this year, I’ll think of the women in my family who didn’t have that freedom and the people today who still don’t. I won’t forget that those freedoms are precious, and I certainly won’t forget to be grateful for them.

This post is part of our A Year of Gratitude Series. You can find the introduction, inspiration, and entire year’s gratitude’s posts here.