Being thankful is easier some years than others. In our youth, we remember that just having a short break from school for Thanksgiving was reason enough to not only be grateful but downright giddy. All the better if there was a football game to be played and ribbon candy to be consumed. With each passing year, something new would arrive to enhance and expand the gathering – a reunion of school friends, a budding romance, seat after seat added to the kid table. Laughter. Hugs. Old stories told as new.
Inevitably, bits of darkness fall upon the festivities. The elder generation dwindles. Old wounds, superficially healed by time and distance, are reopened by a careless word or act. The tragedies of life – broken relationships, economic hardship, declining health, loneliness – are suppressed but poorly hidden.
The world of distraction – on this day football and food – is welcome but limited in its power. The problems of our time are too big, too complicated to be dismissed for even an afternoon. And so thankfulness itself has an edge. With reminders of impermanence everywhere, the words “I am thankful” feel almost like a lament.
It is not our place to tell you that you should be thankful, never mind what you should be thankful for. And we won’t tell you to cast aside your worries over the next couple of days and enjoy yourself; we know that many of you don’t have that luxury.
But we can remind you that at the heart of thankfulness is a conscious decision to elevate, if only for a moment, your perception of the world. Everybody has that power, but too often it goes unused. We are seduced by fear, hatred, pessimism, envy and anger, and we become blind to their opposites. Thanksgiving is as much a prompt to remedy that as it is a celebration.
We hope all of you have a wonderful time with family and friends. We hope you laugh a lot and eat well. We hope, more than anything, that you feel loved. We understand the world well enough to know what our hope is worth, but still we hope.
If somehow even hope feels just out of reach as you gather together this week, remember that you have the power to decide, second by second, how you will exist in the world, that in a very real way the choice between empathy and apathy, kindness and cruelty, love and hate, light and darkness, is, thankfully, yours.