Although the turkey, rolls, stuffing, and potatoes form the core of most people’s Thanksgiving meals, many families make changes to those staples or skip them altogether. I am always interested in how families adapt and make holidays their own. Maybe it is some secret ingredient your grandma added to the yams or a card game your family gets competitive over while the Detroit Lions play in the background. What are your traditions, what do you look forward to each year? One tradition that never fails to move me is the sacrifice that each of us working in health care—and our friends and families make—to postpone our holiday celebrations when necessary. If you are spending next Thursday caring for our in-patient population, please accept my thanks and the thanks of your colleagues.
This recent article from Well-Being at Iowa got me thinking about what I’m thankful for and how gratitude can infuse our work all year. The article has good suggestions on how to do this, like building connections with peers over successes or using compliments instead of complaints and making thankfulness a daily habit. I encourage you to give the article a read and think about your own relationship to gratitude. The writer suggests that this sets a good example for our kids, and I absolutely agree. But another area in which we can model this and an area I’m extremely grateful for is in our relationship with our students and trainees.
Upi’s “Oh, WOW” moment
What a privilege it is to be an educator! I know that most of us can point to at least one or hopefully a few influential educators in our past. Some have taught us fundamentals that still shape how we view a system or approach a diagnostic, others maybe a shortcut or mnemonic to super-glue a tricky concept in our minds. Teachers like that are invaluable, no question. But there are other educators that teach us bigger lessons, maybe about what it means to be generous team-members or what truly matters in medicine. I remember once when a mentor told me in the lab that I had won a major award, my first reaction was just to go back to pipetting the samples I was working with. But he made me pause, to absorb the win, to celebrate. These moments of success, especially in science, can be rare and we owe it to ourselves—and to the people who coach us into them—to acknowledge them, no matter how small. These moments build our confidence and they sustain us through the more fallow periods, helping us push past moments that feel like dead-ends. I have not forgotten that pause, and I have been lucky to be in his position with my own trainees and colleagues, forcing someone else to look in the mirror and tell them, “Remember this. This is what success looks like. You earned it.” I am deeply grateful to give this gift.
Photo for reflection 
Speaking of gifts, I hope you were able to step outside last week and see the Northern Lights in the Iowa sky. I am told that this is an extraordinarily rare event here. Even now, looking at this photo, I remember how it felt, but the picture cannot quite recreate the effect. These rippling curtains are evidence of interaction between the sun’s radiating particles and atmospheric gases held by the Earth’s magnetic field. The scientist in me understands that solar winds are blowing past us all the time. But these rare moments of visibility, especially this far south, should excite the poet in us as much as the scientist. There is beauty around us always, sometimes seeing it is out of our control because of our perspective. Other times, we are in the right place at the right time to witness something as close to magic as we might ever find, and we should remember just how lucky we are.
Finally
After that internal pause of recognition, the deep breath in gratitude, I hope you will also remember to spread that good feeling. We are once again participating in the Toys for Tots campaign and donation boxes have been placed in the department’s administration office as well as at locations Downtown, North Liberty, and in our Medicine Specialties Clinic. Please consider grabbing an extra item as you dig into your end-of-year holiday shopping and drop it off at work. If you prefer to make a cash donation, you can use this link to do so. Thank you in advance and Happy Thanksgiving!
