Striking a balance

Those of you who went home for Thanksgiving like me probably experienced the special kind of weirdness that can only come from returning to your home after living on your own. This stems from the simple fact that going back to a space where you spent your younger years can conjure up all kinds of emotions and memories, from carefree afternoons as a little kid to fights with your parents as a teenager. And no matter how you feel about your family, spending time in a space with so much of your past bumping around is, well, weird. In many ways, holidays like Thanksgiving amplify this: Since the holidays themselves are already emotionally charged, combining them with a return home only brings about more strangeness.

This Thanksgiving, as I chopped vegetables for stuffing as per my mother’s instructions, the amplified awkwardness led me to thoughts about the peculiar intersection of gratitude and discontent. Back in the days when I lived with my parents, all I wanted was to not have to live with my parents anymore. Home felt cramped and boring, and when it came time to move my stuff to New York for orientation, I was more than ready to leave. Yet these days, when I return home I’m struck more with gratitude than with discontent—gratitude for a family that loves and supports me, and for a place to come back to, one that is warm and safe and full of food. I’d never want to live at home again—now that I’ve left, it’s difficult to go back—but at the same time, I’m grateful to have had the chance to live there for the first 18 years of my life.

Home isn’t the only thing about which I feel this mixture of discontent and gratitude. I’ve rarely been as grateful about anything as I have been about the opportunity to go to college at Barnard. But I’ve also rarely been as frustrated about anything as I have about Barnard’s mandatory meal plan and full-time tuition policies. I’m glad I live in New York City, but not glad that so many others who do have to live on the street. Studying what I love is a huge blessing, but academia is beginning to feel as cramped as my parents’ house. Hard as we try, it seems like we can’t really escape this juxtaposition. We’re grateful for X, but we wish Y could be just a little different.

How are we to live with this kind of strange mixture? Usually, we end up falling into one emotion or the other. On the one hand, we can use “gratitude” as a way to avoid confronting the things we don’t like about our lives. If we were truly grateful, we reason, we wouldn’t complain about what’s difficult or unjust. While gratitude does rule out complaining for the sake of complaining, it doesn’t mean we pretend that everything is perfect and amazing. We can be thankful for the good things in our lives without giving up the right to change the bad. It’s not ingratitude to identify something as a problem.

On the other hand, we can get so caught up in the things we want to change that we forget to be thankful for the good. Sometimes, our frustrations about Barnard or Columbia can make us forget that it’s a great privilege to even go to college here at all. It doesn’t make our frustrations any less valid to recognize the things for which we should be grateful, and we can advocate for changes to bad policies while still maintaining an attitude of thankfulness for being able to attend this University.
It may seem impossible, but the way forward is balance between gratitude and discontent. Managing the two extremes consists in looking at a problem and a blessing square in the face, acknowledging each of them for what they are. When we find ourselves tipping to one side or the other, we should stop and consider. After all, that I don’t want to live with my family doesn’t mean the food isn’t delicious.

Kathryn Brill is a Barnard College junior majoring in English. She is a member of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. We Should Talk runs alternate Mondays.