Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday ever since I first moved to the US in 1973.
It is my favorite holiday for many reasons and on many
levels. For a fat kid, it is the best holiday, you are expected to partake in massive
consumption of the bounties of the land. What can be better than that? Turkey,
dressing, mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles, and pumpkin pies; it was a
fat kid’s dream. I don’t even mind the cranberries. When we think of
Thanksgiving, the mental picture that comes to mind is that of Norman Rockwell’s
“Freedom from Want”: a table crowded with family and abundance of food, and the
unspoken love that permeates the scene.
On a poetic Americana level, the Thanksgiving holiday is
evocative of a more romantic and idealistic time, when American society was
much more agrarian, when the end of harvest meant something to everyone. The
marking of a change of seasons when the hard work of harvesting is done, it was
time to rest and reflect before the resumption of the planting season in the
Spring. This sentiment is best expressed
by Connecticut Governor Wilbur Cross’ Thanksgiving Proclamation from 1939. It has
become an example of evocative exposition, I read it every Thanksgiving eve to
get into the mood of the season.
Fall is also my favorite season of the year. The scent of
Fall, the colorful landscape dotted with the golden hues of the changing
leaves, the need to wear a jacket to ward off the chill of the season, and the visions
from my memories of being ensconced in the comfort of home and hearth while
being tucked in against the nip of the
cool weather outside.
Most importantly, there is also the meaning of holiday
itself. Even though our knowledge of the holiday’s origins have been imbued
with the mythmaking involving the Pilgrims and Native Americans partaking in a
meal together; the sentiments of gratitude, thankfulness, familial warmth,
friendship, nostalgia for simpler times, and community is always present and treasured.
It is a time to enjoy the companionship of families and friends, a time for
friendship, and communion with our family members. Even though my own family was just a nuclear
family of three, my parents had always hosted others to celebrate together;
whether they are newly arrived families to the communities, students and
children of friends who have been planted in a foreign land for an unfamiliar
holiday, or just friends. My parents didn’t need a reason to host Thanksgiving.
Thanksgivings were always a time for togetherness, full bellies, and a great
time celebrating amity and our commonalities.
Accordingly, we know that this year is going to be different.
It is: Amity in the time of COVID. We will be struggling and searching for reasons
to be thankful in excruciatingly difficult times. It is not that we are
incapable of finding things to be thankful for, it is that the circumstances facing
our world has become so strained and constrained that it is best that we lower
our external sights to look deeper into our internal self, in our hearts and
minds, to find gratitude that came easily in previous years.
In some ways, that makes our thanks in this time of chaos
and uncertainty much more precious because we are not giving superficial thanks
to the obvious advantages that we take for granted because they have
disappeared for the moment; we are instead giving thanks for the inherent,
amorphous, and ethereal. The emotional toll of isolation, disruption of our
long-accustomed routines, and the metamorphosis of our economic wellbeing
strains us; as the curtailment of travel, commerce, and large social gatherings
constrains us. In some ways, we are no longer us, or the us that we have known
and taken for granted; we have been changed, abruptly, without having given our
consent, and perhaps irrevocably. We
have evolved instead: in some ways we have evolved routinely and perhaps for the
better, yet in some ways we have evolved abruptly and for the worse. Regardless
of how and why we have evolved, this Thanksgiving of 2020 has allowed my ruminations
about the holiday to mirror my present state of mind. After months of solitude,
change, and adjustments, my point of view about this Thanksgiving has changed as
compared to the many previous Thanksgivings.
I could follow the pessimistic trend that has been with me since
February with my internal dialog and bemoan the loss of opportunities and
freedoms that I once took for granted pre-pandemic. I can, if I chose, to
recount like the most precise and exacting accountant, all that had been denied
me and bitterly list all that the universe owes me. Or I can exercise my
free-will, and choose to observe all those losses as they are: things over
which I have no control; indeed, they are circumstances in which the only freedom
afforded me was my choice of choosing my intrinsic reaction. Of course, being a
tiny minded, self-absorbed, and entitled human, there will always be a sense of
loss and emotional despondence whenever the memories of this point in time
surfaces in my memory, but this too shall pass.
My search for thankfulness in this time is of course, a work
in progress, untested by my reality, but the alternative promises to be
miserable, unsatisfying, and unpromising. I choose to take control of what I
can control.
I am thankful for friendships. New ones that I never
expected but have already been tested in the cauldron of necessity in these
times. Old ones that have renewed and strongly affirmed because of those
friends who have steadfastly given of themselves: their time, their energy,
their unique perspective, and their unconditional love. I have depended on the
kindness of friends to pull my thoughts out from the deepest abyss, an abyss
that is of my mind’s own making. It is due to my friends that I am still at a
relatively steady state of mind as the pandemic persists from days to weeks,
and then to months. I am not sure if they all understand what they have meant
to my mental state, I hope that they do now.
I am thankful for the challenges that have been set before
me during the pandemic. It feels like we have been hitting driver on every
swing: every little bit of weakness that is hidden in our swing has not only
been exposed but amplified. It has forced us to improvise, adapt, and overcome in
everything we do every day. We have had to learn to make decisions quickly and
correctly as befitting the situation. While I am not perfect at this yet, I am
getting better as the pandemic continues, as has everyone. The magic of
neuroplasticity has made me realize that my mind is much more agile that I
assumed while I hope that it is less beholden to my biases and logical fallacies.
No doubt I will continue to stumble and err, the difference is that I am no longer
afraid of erring and I have confidence that I can improvise, adapt, and
overcome.
I am thankful for the Stoic point of view. My ability to think
about things that I can control versus those I can not control comes from the
dichotomy of control that is fundamental to Stoicism. Stoics have also allowed
me to take the perspective of “premedio valorem”, or “what is the worst thing that can happen?”
This perspective opened my eyes to my own myopia when I became so focused on
the negative possibilities rather than the indifferent probable, that was the
source of my despair, my own vivid ability to be negative. The irony is that by
thinking about the worst show us how our fertile and generally pessimistic
conjectures in hard times result in fantasies which drives our worst fatalist
fears about the unknown; whereas the practice of playing out “premedio maloram”
logically and systematically leads us to the realization that all is not as
dire as our immediate emotional responses will predict. It sometimes is
necessary to be cruel to be kind to yourself.
I am thankful for all the material possessions that have accrued
over my time on earth, and I am thankful for the knowledge that material
possessions are not permanent.
I am thankful for the realization that our time on earth is
finite, it is not so much that we have so little time available to us, it is that
we are frivolous in how we use that time that we have to do what we wish.
I am thankful for my personal view of life, and the paradigm
that I carry with me all the time; I am also thankful for the revelation that
paradigms are transient, we should be changing paradigms all the time in order
to best use our time here.
Of course, I am thankful for that fat and happy post-Thanksgiving
prandial somnolence.
I wish you all better days and nights to come, a
post-pandemic world, and Peace.
Pete
