Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

I love Thanksgiving. I love that it started out as a Puritan observance which morphed as America grew into a secular national holiday based on themes of gratitude and providence. I love that it is religious without being religious. I love that all Americans can take a day to give thanks and acknowledge their gratitude. As humans we easily get lost in the grind of life, of dealing with calamity and heartbreak and financial pressures and futility and disappointment. We need to pull out of it, to press “pause” and regain perspective. If you are breathing, you are alive. I know I sound like Pollyanna, but it is true that no matter what’s happening in our lives, there is always something to be grateful for, and in fact, the time to acknowledge this is when things are blackest.

Thirteen years ago, I was let go one week before Thanksgiving, with no severance, with a wife and child, with rent to pay and mouths to feed, during the throes of a national recession. And yet, we had Thanksgiving dinner, and regardless of all else, we had each other, we had a home, we had friends and family, and we gave thanks. It was a hard time, and hard times require that you reach out and grab the lifelines of hope, or life, of love. Because life can be bleak.

Faith is not a religious thing, faith is the willingness and the need to believe in something without knowing for sure that things will turn out. Faith is putting yourself in your doctor’s hands during a medical procedure. Faith is getting on an airliner and believing the ground crews and the pilots and air traffic control will do their jobs. And faith is trusting in Providence and hope, whatever that means to you, that if you push through your despair, you will find your way. That you and your family will make it, even if you see no way out.

We as a people need Thanksgiving. We need to acknowledge our blessings and what is good in our lives. I love Thanksgiving because all of us get to do that on the same day.

I. Vonnegut on recognizing when it’s good

I came across this video a few weeks ago, and it fits in well with thanksgiving and my personal view of life. I have been on this earth for over six decades. We easily recognize the really bad times in life, but we many times do not know that the best times in our lives are right now, this minute. If we get into a car wreck, it’s pretty damned obvious that right now, it sucks. But, if we are with friends, or with our families, and we are floating lazily down a river, or being together around a campfire, or just hanging out at a coffee shop or bar, we are so in the moment that the moment slips by, and we don’t recognize that now, right now, we are happy. We need to do that, my friends. We need to do that.

From this talk:

What uncle Alex found objectionable about human beings, is that they seldom noticed that they were happy. And so we would be sitting under an apple tree on a July afternoon, for instance, drinking lemonade and, you know, talking about this and that, and practically buzzy with honeybees, and uncle Alex would stop everything and say “wait a minute, stop! If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is!” And so he would do that again and again, and it was very good advice and I’ve taken it up, and I hope that you will take up this habit, too, of noticing when things are really, awfully nice, and say “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

This entire talk is great, but this section made me pause, and think, “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Happy Thanksgiving