Life’s pretty good. I have my health, my kids show no signs of wanting to harm animals, and I live in a place where nice people sell boiled peanuts on the side of the road. Not bad. And I try to live right. I’m no Mother Theresa, but I do what I can. Like at the grocery store, when they ask me if I want to round up my total to help local charities, like the youth sports association, most of the time I say yes.
But I still recognize there’s room for improvement, so I’m putting in the work, trying to be a better person. Self-improvement and whatnot. Blah blah blah. One of the aspects I need to work on is being more present and grateful. I’m not alone in this. If you’re reading this, you basically won the proverbial lottery just by being born in America and living during the 21st century. Do you know how lucky we are to be alive during a time when we can wear shoes with wheels that pop out of the soles? I mean, Taco Bell serves breakfast now. These are magical times.
Is life perfect? Of course not. But most of us fail to appreciate all the little things that are good in this world. We complain about the imperfections as we ride in our self-driving cars from our climate-controlled homes to the trailhead where we pedal $10,000 bikes through a forest on trails that were designed by professionals to make adults smile and say “whee.”
I’m not pointing fingers; I’m the worst when it comes to gratitude. I could win the lottery and complain about the taxes. They say you learn the true value of something only after you lose it. I learned this firsthand during the pandemic, when so many mundane things like going to the grocery store were suddenly out of reach. And then during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, I became super grateful for everyday luxuries like hot showers and the ability to keep food cold.
But that’s the irony of gratitude, right? We can’t acknowledge it until the thing we’re grateful for is gone. A bicycle. A loved one. Electricity running to our house…wouldn’t it be great if I could express gratitude for these things before I lost them?
So, consider this my first entry into a gratitude journal where I show appreciation for things before they’re gone.
I’m grateful for the padded chamois. Biking wouldn’t be the same without them.
I’m grateful for the professional trail builders that craft whimsical singletrack through our mountains. I’m especially grateful for the ones that provide easy B-lines around jumps and drops for people like me. I started mountain biking long before “professional trail builder” was a job and I survived decades of fall-line trails that tested my early-era V-brakes. Trust me, mountain biking is better now.
I’m grateful for max-cushion running shoes, foam rollers and my Theragun, all of which help keep me running.
I’m grateful for our national park system and the park service rangers that take care of them. This is an important one, because the majority of those rangers were furloughed without pay during the government shutdown this fall, and many of those national park units were closed to visitors. I went for a run in Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield during the shutdown and was met with locked gates at the parking lot and a closed visitor center.
Hopefully, by the time you read this article, that shutdown is over and things are back to normal at our national parks. Although, the concept of “normal” inside our parks is skewed these days, because the Trump administration has fired a quarter of our national park rangers and their support staff since taking office in January. Let me be clear here: There’s nothing political about that statement. It’s just a fact. A quarter of the employees at the National Park Service have been kicked to the curb, and the administration has expressed plans for another round of layoffs within the NPS. The end goal is to slash the budget, even though the park service has trouble maintaining our parks with their current level of funding. Great Smoky Mountains National Park alone has almost $250 million in deferred maintenance.
I don’t cover politics, and I try not to write about anything that would be divisive in our times. We’re divided enough without me chiming in. Everyone can get behind Taco Bell breakfast and bike chamois, right?
But I don’t think expressing an appreciation for our national parks is divisive. If anything, this is common ground that reasonable people on all sides of the spectrum can stand on. Everyone loves our national parks. I’ve spent a lot of time in Great Smoky Mountains National Park recently, and it’s basically a melting pot for modern American society. Pagans, conservative Christians, rednecks, hippies, yuppies, school children, retirees, conspiracy theorists, scientists…hang out in the parking lot of Sugarlands Visitor Center near Gatlinburg and you’ll find a sampling of all of these people throughout the day. And they’re all smiling and enjoying themselves, because Great Smoky Mountains National Park is awesome. All national parks are awesome. The notion of setting aside our most inspiring and delicate landscapes for protection and then putting those landscapes in public ownership so we can all enjoy them, has been lauded as America’s best idea. It’s an idea so good, that the rest of the world has been inspired by it and adopted it for their own.
I grew up in a conservative family and I’m a liberal journalist, so we don’t agree on much. We’ll argue about everything from the notion of universal health care to Taylor Swift’s presence at a football game. Don’t get us started on electric vehicles. But if there’s one thing everyone at my family dinner table can agree on, it’s that national parks, and the rangers that work in them, are valuable. We can all agree that life is better because we have national parks.
I just hope it doesn’t take losing that park system as we know it, for us to express some gratitude.
