On Congestion, Chapstick, and Gratitude

I only thought to write this because I have been quite congested the last few days, which is emblematic of the issue: we are ungrateful as a rule. We go through life with so many blessings and things to be grateful for that we take for granted, and it’s only once we no longer have one of these things that we feel any emotion about it. This is probably why the popular saying:

You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

exists. Sure, it might feel like a sappy cliché kind of thing to say, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Now, back to congestion, when we are congested and having to blow our nose every 30 minutes it annoys us to no end as it should. We wake up every morning hoping it’s gone, we take steam showers to loosen up drainage, we take medicine to do the same. We will do just about anything to get rid of congestion.

When we finally aren’t congested anymore we appreciate it for an hour at most, and then we completely forget about congestion as a concept until it strikes us again.

I propose that congestion should always be in the front of our minds. We should wake up every day take a deep breath through our noses and let it out as slowly as we can through our nose as to really cherish that specific moment. After this, we should say to ourselves “I am grateful I am not congested.”

And if for some reason you’re the one person who has never been cursed congestion, think about having chapped lips. When we have chapped lips it annoys us to no end. We then search through assorted drawers to find the one stick of chapstick we’ve had had for the last few years and make sure we keep it on us as if it were a member of the “Big Three” — wallet, keys, and phone — for a short bit of time. However, once this short bit of time has passed we tend to put the chapstick back in that random drawer.

I think we should extend “Big Three” membership rights out to chapstick as a daily reminder to ourselves to appreciate that our lips aren’t chapped.

If the chapstick examples means nothing to you either, then you have transcended this plane of existence and I have a million questions to ask you when you have the time of course because I’m sure you’re a busy person.