By Ray Balogh
InkFreeNews

KOSCIUSKO COUNTY — Be thankful. It’s good for the soul.

Perhaps the most inherent benefit of thankfulness is the incorporation of an outside party into the process.

Unless one is thanking oneself — an advisably rare indulgence in self-importance — one is directing that gratitude toward, and acknowledging the value of, someone else.

That in itself is an uplifting exercise in emotional health. It’s hard to be narcissistic while humbly acknowledging someone else’s contributions in one’s life, and it is nearly impossible to be lonely and depressed while doing so.

Thankfulness can also trigger an epiphany of the incalculable efforts and collaborations in the chain of human endeavor to allow one to perform even the simplest praiseworthy effort.

I remember one incident during my high school days that still vibrantly resonates half a century later.

My dad and I dropped off some bags of groceries to an impoverished widow in downtown Fort Wayne. As I set one of the bags on her kitchen table, I noticed the box of Nilla Wafers sitting on the top of the sack.An intriguing question sparked my mind: “How many people did it take to bring that box to this table?”

Over the decades I have reflected on that challenge with a burgeoning fascination and deepening sense of thankfulness for the often unwitting interconnectedness of the human experience.

Sure, I was one who hefted the bag onto the table, but Dad drove me to the widow’s home from the grocery store, where the cashier placed the box in the bag.

We had chosen the box from the display previously stocked by another store employee, who retrieved the box from storage after other workers unloaded the delivery truck.

Dad paid for the purchase with money he earned from repairing cars at his service station, paid to him by customers who, in turn, earned the wages at their respective jobs.

And Dad needed a place to work and all the equipment attendant to his labors.

Someone had to build his service station, install gas pumps and hydraulic lifts and manufacture the tools he used for repairs.

Multiply that small army of engineers, excavators, building contractors, electricians, tool and die makers and other technicians and general laborers, all using equipment manufactured in factories built by other armies, by the efforts necessary to provide gainful employment for each and all of Dad’s customers.

The retrograde analysis exponentially mushrooms when considering how many blue- and white-collar workers it took to plan and install roadways, bridges and utilities to get bulldozers, semis and other vehicular behemoths along highways, through forests and into mines and warehouses.

The wafers were made from ingredients that required plowing, tilling, planting, harvesting, mixing and cooking, and the box required the felling and processing of lumber, preparation of ink, manufacture of the plastic liner bag and assembly by tireless machinery.

Add to all those efforts the financial and insurance industries, safety and health inspectors and shipbuilders for import and export trade.

Scan the rear horizon back centuries when mines were opened, roads were carved and the power of electricity and internal combustion engines was first harnessed, and stand in awe of the invisible thread of human collaboration between and among the literal tens or hundreds of millions of hard-working souls, many of whom never came within a thousand miles of each other or even inhabited the globe at the same time — just to bring a simple box of wafers to a hungry widow.

And thank them all.

Especially on this holiday, whose central purpose can never really be exhausted, for there is far more thanks deserved than we could ever conjure or shout into the ether, even in our most fertile imagination.

Happy Thanksgiving.