From the HSR’s “friendly Frank” to our energetic Tim Hortons cashier, Terri, in McMaster University Student Centre, the McMaster community is lucky to have Hamilton community members who contribute to the betterment of Mac.

Greater gratitude should be given to those who contribute to McMaster from the Hamilton community.

We should be taking inspiration from Diana Marginean, who created a crowdfunding campaign to thank Frank Palin  for being such a friendly bus driver.

Palin drives the 51 bus in Hamilton and through McMaster, where he engages with hundreds of McMaster students on a weekly basis.

He is known for singing his own versions of “The Wheels on the Bus” to encourage his passengers to move back and make room for more people on the bus, and for greeting everyone with a friendly hello and wishing people a great day as they get off the bus.

Marginean is a McMaster graduate who noticed how many students were commenting about Palin on the “Spotted at Mac” Facebook page and understood the importance of showing appreciation to those who have a positive impact on students’ lives at McMaster.

Greater gratitude should be given to those who contribute to McMaster from the Hamilton community.

To show this appreciation, Marginean started a campaign with donations from 77 people who raised $950 for Palin in four months, which he decided to donate to McMaster to support international students and in need.

He hopes to establish a bursary that will allow international students to have a positive experience in Canada. Palin named it the “This is Canada” fund as he hopes that it will show the way Canadians help one another out and create positive experiences for one another.

An iFundMac page has been set up with Palin’s $1,300 contribution to launch the fund. $1,700 is needed to reach the required minimum amount to establish a student award for international students.

Like Palin, Terri Marshall, who works at the Tim Hortons in MUSC, is also known to uplift students with her positive enthusiasm, even at 7:30 a.m.

Whether you’re buying a coffee or simply walking by, Marshall will be able to put a smile on your face with her radiant attitude no matter what your struggle is.

Marshall has been singing, dancing and keeping students entertained while serving coffee for the past 11 years, and has been doing her best to make students smile everyday.

She writes inspiring messages on your coffee and is known to draw hearts on your lids.

In 2015, McMaster students raised $1,700 with 142 donations to give back and show their appreciation.

They surprised Marshall with an impromptu dance party and a cheque to send her on vacation with smiles like the ones she encourages daily.

Her positivity has become an integral part of student’s university experience that most McMaster students have encountered and can reflect on.

Like Palin, Marshall’s impact on students is one that works towards improving student mental health and encouraging positive attitudes in the McMaster-Hamilton community.

Their contributions to the McMaster community are priceless and have an important positive impact and that should be shown appreciation that is as consistent as their positivity from McMaster students, like the efforts that have been made to give back to Marshall and Palin.

These are efforts that should be extended to community members who work to empower McMaster students and create a positive environment in the community.

Likewise, McMaster university should find ways to thank these wonderful individuals and individuals of the Hamilton community alike that work towards the betterment of students’ lives.

Whether it be our institutional partners or individuals like Palin and Marshall, who help make out daily lives easier and more positive, it is important to show appreciation to those who help McMaster students’ daily routines run smoother.

This will create a feedback loop of gratitude and will work towards encouraging positivity in all interactions at McMaster.

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Rick Kanary
The Silhouette

Pumpkins that turn into carriages. Little mice role-playing valiant white steeds. Glass slippers and royal balls. It always begins in this dream state where every meal tastes better; every sunny day is a little brighter, and each romantic evening longer and more memorable. Then comes the white-knuckled ranting. A discourse of expletives and stomping away to a ‘happy place’. Guerilla warfare and subversive subterfuge of the highest caliber. The course of relationships can be a white-water raft ride or a roller coaster that could compete with the Behemoth.

Whether or not our love lives can be measured by chemical reactions in the brain, reduced to a purely biological phenomenon, we each still feel the grip of love as real as anything else, maybe even more so.

For me, falling in love tends to make everything surreal. Days blend into nights, obligations and expectations seem far less haughty, and everything sacred lies within my grasp.

I’ve heard that the brain will actually focus major resources on particular moments, making them feel longer. This could be true of a first kiss and every other memorable moment during the gracious period of entwining the deepest part of myself with another person. Every last one of us is granted the opportunity to experience this wonderful time- perhaps even many times over.

The remaining question is not whether or not you will fall in love, rather the question becomes how do you make that strong connection last?

First of all, you are lucky to make these deep connections with someone. Someone who can both laugh with and at you. Someone who stands by your side when you are up against horrible odds. Someone for whom you feel obligated to do the same. Someone, perhaps, for whom you would “take a bullet”. These are not circumstances one should take lightly. These emotional ties are strengthened through daily ritual and practice, a practice of gratitude.

I am thankful that I have someone who will fight for me by fighting with me. Someone who will call me out on my crap and tell me what I could and should be doing better than I currently am. Someone who also expects me to do the same. I am grateful to have someone to judge me, with positive outcomes in mind. She keeps me grounded. Sends me skyrocketing through the atmosphere. Keeps me sane. Makes me crazy. This may sound, and is, extreme at times. So extreme I must question whether or not it is too much to manage, too much to return to a place of peace. Yet, peace does come. In abundance.

Perhaps this is the balancing act. Balancing such extremes as to test the boundaries of another person’s sanity and morality, to test their personal values and their devotion to those values. Through these tests, while seemingly chaotic and intolerable, we may find a truer definition of self than before and a clearer and more fulfilling concept of love and life than we had ever thought possible. It is through trials that we grow stronger and prevail.

Upon realizing this, I am no longer clouded with such grief over the dissolution of my ‘biological’ family.  I’ve shed the dross of the ‘Nuclear’ family, shellacked upon me by a system of teachings that had not yet adapted; multi-media, an incubating school curriculum, all developed by a generation that had yet to pass the mantle. The modern family is clearly undefinable. Politicking families and the individual’s personal concept of a ‘significant other’ is no longer accomplishing anything and, so, Canadian policy in this regard has been in consistent reform to better suit the increasingly heterogenic concept. This is true of relationships too. Politically, Canada has come to define family as anyone you consider family. I couldn’t agree more. My Thanksgiving weekend was spent with all of my neighbours collectively making a massive feast. My fiancée and I with our 3 kids, the divorced single dad, the older couple whose patriarch adopted his wife’s daughter, the lesbian couple sharing 3 teenage to twenty-something kids between them, and extended family as diverse as the rest. These are the people with whom I choose to celebrate. This is the truth of love and relationships. Whomever will stand by you and support you, emotionally, financially, physically, holistically, and whom you will stand by too.  That is the only defining factor in this postmodern age.

You’re asking ‘ok, Rick, I hear you, but how do you keep it together?  How do you make it last?’

I have no magic answer. I keep it at this brief checklist:

“Am I in love?”

Alon Coret
The Silhouette

Living a thankful, grateful, appreciative life has numerous benefits.

It was found that people who are thankful tend to perform better in school, have fewer mental health problems, sleep better, and build stronger relationships.

The holiday we call Thanksgiving is celebrated in various ways and at different times around the world.

In sixteenth century England, various days of fasting and Thanksgiving were an integral part of the English Reformation; celebrated by the Puritans, these special days sought to replace the various existing church holidays – including Christmas and Easter. The American version of Thanksgiving is generally traced to a celebration of good harvest, which took place in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621. This initial celebration, inspired by Puritan pilgrims who immigrated to the United States, became a regular holiday in New England by the late 1660s.

In Canada, the roots of the Thanksgiving holiday are unclear. Some attribute it to the explorer Martin Frobisher, who, in 1578, celebrated his safe journey across the North Atlantic. Others claim that early French settlers, who held harvest feasts throughout the fall and winter, inspired the holiday. The Thanksgiving holiday is also celebrated in Germany (Erntedankfest), Japan (Kinro Kansha No Hi), the Netherlands, and Liberia. Although celebrated differently, Thanksgiving is a universal holiday, at least in terms of its name: Gratitude. Appreciation. Recognition. Indebtedness. A sense of humility…

I think everybody could celebrate it as a very human holiday. The notion of Thanksgiving calls upon us to look beyond ourselves, and say ‘thank you.’ Whether that appreciation is directed at a family member, at a friend, at oneself, or whoever and whatever else – it’s important that we express it somehow.

Being thankful should be a daily practice, something beyond plain etiquette. It is a quality that often needs to be nurtured, dusted off; you could even argue that the ability to feel thankfulness is a talent. During stressful and difficult times, being thankful becomes difficult; it is simply so much easier to fixate on the problems (real or ‘first-world’), and it can be far more fun to bitch and complain than to take note of all the good things taking place around us. Thanksgiving teaches us to celebrate the full half of the glass – as should be done in the remaining 364 days of the year.

A quick Google search can show you that living an appreciative life has numerous benefits. For example, it was found that people who are thankful tend to perform better in school, have fewer mental health problems, sleep better, and build stronger relationships. Of course, one could argue that these are reversible causations and instead say that people who perform better in school, experience good mental health, sleep well, and have close friends tend to be more thankful in life. It would be difficult to disagree.

So for the more skeptical readers, consider the following examples. The first is a study on gratitude conducted by Emmons and McCullough, who asked groups of participants to write a few sentences each week. One group wrote about things they were grateful for, a second group wrote about daily irritations or things that had upset them, and the third group simply wrote about events that had affected them (in a neutral tone). After ten weeks, those who wrote about gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives. They also exercised more and had fewer visits to physicians than those who focused on sources of aggravation. Another study showed that managers who remember to say "thank you" to workers tend to have more motivated employees. Researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania randomly divided university fundraisers into two groups. One group made phone calls to solicit alumni donations in their usual way. The second group received a pep talk from the director of annual giving, who expressed her gratitude for their efforts. During the following week, the university employees who heard her message of gratitude made 50% more fundraising calls than those who did not.

Although neither of these studies necessarily points to cause and effect, they certainly show an association between thankfulness (whether to oneself or to others) and positive outcomes. Thus, I encourage you to make thankfulness a greater part of your daily life. Whether you say ‘thank you’ explicitly, think appreciative thoughts or write them down, pray, or practice mindfulness or meditation – it all counts.