As our family sat around the table after our Christmas meal, our 21-year-old grandchild started talking about all the problems he faced last year and his thoughts on the new year.

He said he worried a lot about how it was being isolated and alone in COVID lockdowns at college.

He felt he had an “academic skills gap” and how he was struggling now to catch up before graduation.

He talked about the anxiety of getting a job after graduation and how COVID affected employment and how he didn’t want his education to go to waste.

Somehow the conversation switched over to how easy it must have been back in the day of his great-great-grandparents, my grandparents’ era.

It got me to thinking about my paternal grandfather. He was born in 1903. His parents had moved to the United States from Motessicz, Slovakia, 13 years before he was born. When he was about 12, World War I had begun. It ended four years later with 22 million deaths.

My grandfather spoke no English and his parents were very poor. He went to only sixth grade in school and had to go to work outside of the farm to help his parents provide for his brothers and sisters.

When he was about 20 years old, he married my grandmother. That was just four years after the global pandemic called the Spanish flu first hit and 50 million had people died. They only went to church on Sunday and did a quick grocery shopping once a week but good news, electricity comes to the farm. Only the house has electric. The barn and other building will wait a few years.

He was just 30 years old with four children when the New York Exchange collapsed, banks closed, causing inflation, unemployment and hunger. It took a long time for him to trust a bank after that, and he kept some cash in a safe in the house until he died.

When he was in his 40s, World War II starts. The Holocaust is going on, with 6 million Jews dying, and after the war ended a total of 60 million people were lost.

Back on the farm, phone service comes, and one big black phone is hung on the wall in the kitchen. Mail is delivered on a regular basis.

When he was 51, the Korean War begins and he and my grandmother see two sons go off to war. Both came back and their prayers were answered.

When he was in his 60s, the Vietnam War starts and it ended when he was in his 70s.

He passed away at the age of 84. Looking back, he went through a lot of stress and anxiety over money, making a living, enduring a pandemic, surviving deadly Midwest snowstorms and tornadoes, losing loved ones and being under all the pressure that generation withstood. He was still a happy man and loved his life.

Today we live in comfort and often have more than we need. We have electricity at the flip of a switch and it’s the end of the world if the electricity goes out unexpectedly.

We have a phone, probably a few phones, a landline and a cellphone for each person in the family so we can talk to whoever we want at anytime we want.

We have hot water and a roof over our heads, which we often take for granted.

We can travel wherever we want and however we want.

Even though we are all suffering through this pandemic, like the generations before us, we will go on.

For right now, let us just take the time to be less selfish, be kinder to everyone and just appreciate all that we have in this new year of 2022.