First, Chef Mojo from Daily Pundit wrote about experiencing life with new hearing aids. Daily Pundit » The Hum and Roar of the World.

At some point when I was a child, it became apparent that I was a bit different from the other kids. Namely, I couldn’t hear the things they heard.

This was somewhat expected, my mother being hearing impaired. I stepped into this life with the genetic code that dialed me down a notch or so when it came to sound. A childhood of constant ear infections only increased the damage.

…

The audiologist took the results of my test and input them into a program on her Dell laptop and dialed up the brands and models of aids that would apply to me. … The thing was an inch long and little over a quarter inch thick, with a very thin tube encasing a wire that attached to a transmitter in the form of flexible silicone earbud. No more ear molds.

… The Lady gave me a little look and said, Hey sweetie. And she started reading from a poster in the office.

I almost started crying.

I’d never heard her before. Not like this. Not this way. Not to the point of being almost normal. Her voice was pure sparkling clarity and oh so sweet.

I turned to the audiologist who said, the humming is the light fixtures overhead. I looked up and it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me within this tiny office. I could hear the secretary a room away on the phone and the printer printing and a phone ringing behind me, and I knew right were it was.

How often are you thankful for just the simple ability to hear, and to hear well?

Secondly, how about waking up from a coma after 19 years, to find that your entire world has changed? BBC NEWS | Europe | Pole wakes up from 19-year coma.

Railway worker Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma after he was hit by a train in 1988. … Doctors gave him only two or three years to live after the accident. … When Mr Grzebski had his accident Poland was still ruled by its last communist leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski. … The following year’s elections ushered in eastern Europe’s first post-communist government. Poland joined the Nato alliance in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.

“Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin,” he told Polish television. “When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere,” Mr Grzebski said. “What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning,” said Mr Grzebski. “I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

Every so often, I try to stop and remember what life used to be like. I try to talk to people who remember what life was like in the 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, and 80′s. Really, we don’t have it so bad today.

So, as you go through your day, try to have an attitude of gratitude — no matter what happens.