Thanksgiving

We live in a time of immense distraction. Moment by moment, breaking news bombards our minds with the next new thing to worry about. Over time I think many of us find it all more exhausting than informing. We need time to digest what it is we are hearing and seeing, and that time, often, just isn’t there. So in the spirit of our times, I have chosen this morning to bombard my modest number of readers with more stuff to process, just in case you were in danger of finding the time to be thankful. 

I think it’s fair to say that some things are easier to digest than others. Porridge, for instance, is easier to digest than say, a bag of party balloons. And I hope my humble blog post is easier to digest than the details of your health equity savings account’s tax liability limits. (I think these are actual words, but I don’t know if they mean anything.) But what I’m writing about is the fact that we seldom find the time to consider all the things we have to be thankful for. And here it is, Thanksgiving time. 

Humans aren’t the only animals that fail to express thankfulness. If you don’t believe me, give your dog a hunk of fillet mignon, and see if he show thanks, or if instead, he stares at you in expectation of another hunk. And then another. Neither does our cat make time to express his thanks. He gets one thing, and he either wants more of that thing, or he wants something else. 

He’s like, “Yes to the cat food, but no, not that cat food…Yes to being let out, but not out that door. The other door. Yes, but maybe no…It looks a little windy out there. Just leave the door ajar, if you will. It’s not that difficult. It’s on hinges, you see.” 

My point is, even us humans, with our world religions devoted to seeing to our devotion, just don’t devote enough time counting our blessings. It is easy to make light of the things we have to be thankful for. “Rub-a-dub dub, thanks for the grub, Yeah God.” So, right now, stop reading this gibberish, and go find a quiet place to think about the things you have to be grateful for. 

The Night That Made This Day (Photo by Jerome Hart)

Now that those readers who would adhere to my suggestion are gone, I will tell the rest of you a few things that I am grateful for:  

First off, I am grateful for a supportive and loving family and friends. A family that is capable of doing for themselves, but finds time to do for others. 

I am grateful for a bountiful Earth that gives freely, or if not, cheaply of its riches. Even as we humans seem hellbent on exploiting every last niche and resource to exhaustion, our world is a marvelously resilient orb of wealth and comfort. And though humans can be cruel, selfish, and exploitive, we can also be kind, nurturing and generous, as well as marvelously entertaining!

I am grateful for curiosity; That we humans can be so wonderfully engaged by things we would like to see and know. A curse and a blessing, both, yes. 

I am grateful for those who came before my time that have made this world a better place. 

I am grateful to live in a time and place of relative freedom, that allows for such diversity of occupations. While eating, sleeping, and procreating are the essential elements of a life form to succeed, we humans have quite a varied diet of activities that we may engage in that are more akin to the arts than they are to necessities of life. It is good to be a human, in these times and in this place, as opposed to say, being a gnat or a fungi.  

I am grateful that I found a field of interest that has never left me wondering if there is anything more that I can do to elevate my little niche of that discipline. 

I am grateful that my interests and capabilities in my field of endeavor are shared and supported by enough others that I may make a living making the things I want to make. It is not a given, in the arts, that one’s ideas will be supported by the marketplace.

I am grateful that there are those who have both a lesser, and a greater piece of the proverbial pie than I have, so that I may know both desire, and satisfaction, from my efforts and my good fortune. To be at either extreme is to be without hopes or dreams.

I am grateful for peanut M&Ms and ice cream. They are things that should have been invented, and were invented, in time for my presence on this Earth. 

And not leastly, but lastly for now, I am grateful for a bit of perspective and wisdom that was shared to me recently by my friend Linda. For this wisdom, she credited someone else, but I forget whom. She said, “If you want to despair for our country, read about it. These are trying times. If you want to be inspired by our country, drive across it.” 

Soul Serenade (photo by Jerome Hart)

I find comfort in those words. Words can be both damaging and comforting, depending on their source and their motive, and depending on where they direct our attention. We can be told, with words, to think of something other than words, and we can abide. We can’t safely and permanently ignore the words, but we can set them aside for a time. Seeing the beauty and the bounty of our country, the mountains, the rivers, the canyons, the fields, even a stretch of lonely highway, there remains a calm to be had. A comforting sense of wellbeing that is right there in front of us, for the taking. For this, I am thankful.

Enough of words for now.