What Is Thankfulness?

I am so thankful....
Thank you so very much....
Have you ever really thought about these words? What do they really mean, what are we trying to say when we express thankfulness? What I started to think about was can you be thankful "in general", that is with no specific focus of thanks?
I think not. The more I have thought about this the more I realized we can only be truly thankful if our thanks is focused on someone who purposefully gave. Let me try to explain.
Can I thank my car for a safe trip to the store? No, it is a machine. As long as it is handled properly it will do as it is designed. My car cannot provide anything on its own. I could express thankfulness to the maker of the car. Thought and care and planning were employed in making a car that does what is designed, but I cannot really be thankful to the car.
Carrying this thought further, I thought about how we say we are thankful for the food we have. I realized we can be thankful only if we really think about what we mean. What is my point of view? Am I thankful to the food, or to the person who prepared it? OK someone says, the food was prepared and made appetizing and all, but the food provides me with energy and I would die without it.
Really? Isn't it my body that processes the food? My system has to break the food into the various items needed for my health and continued life. The food is not in there thinking about what it needs to do in order to build me up. So I can thank the farmers who grow the food, and the person who prepared it, and then myself for making myself grow, right? LOL! "Two out of three ain't bad"
When you get right down to the kernel, the rock bottom basis of all thanksgiving has to be given to God. I don't have to think about how to process my food. My body does it. But how does it know what to do? Who programmed it? I didn't. How does it keep going? If we don't believe in God, then we have to believe it is just blind chance that produced me and you cannot give thanks to a thing. Thankfulness implies you have been given something as the result of a plan by a thinking person. If you are the result of eons of time resulting in the "chance happening" that is you, then there is nothing to give thanks to. Like Topsey you "just growed".
A rational being will realize that all true thanksgiving has to ultimately be directed to a God Who created and continues to uphold His creation. He has thoughts and plans and love for the ones He has created. He is continually at work in many ways to give us life, and that more abundantly. "Give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good." Psalm 106:1