Thanksgiving: An Inside Job
Among the common denominators that join us as human beings, one stands out for me on this fourth week in November: we’re all looking for something. This appears to be true for every one of us, each moment of each day of each of the years that chart our unique timelines. At the most basic level of our existing, we, like all of earth’s creatures, are engaged in a continual quest for something--something to eat, some place to avoid baking or freezing to death, some haven from fear or predation, and some opportunity to perpetuate our name or our biological line. As homo sapiens, however, we embrace other values that often move us to yearn for meaning beyond survival alone.
For retired folks this might be an hour, or an evening, or an uninterrupted weekend to pour ourselves into our favorite hobby or preoccupation. Those in the workforce or busy raising children might be seeking one of those rare moments of tranquility when the frenzy and anxiety of life can be put on hold. But whether we’re young or old, and no matter what the circumstance of our daily activity, we all want to be happy, to feel physically and emotionally healthy, to be in satisfying relationships with one or more like us, and to be successful in our labors of mind and body. All of these beyond-survival elements of our seeking drive our aspirations and direct our priorities, playing themselves out in the unique contexts of time, place and community in which we live, and move, and have our being.
Like the non-human species with whom we share this planet, our search for what we are looking for leads us on excursions that usually lie outside of ourselves, in the people, places and things that are external to our own minds and bodies. In that quest we are likely to presume that what we are seeking must first be recognized, then hunted, found, and finally incorporated into the empty vessel of self that we are trying to fill. So we end up exerting much of our time and energy to the discovery and acquisition of the objects of our searching. Upon securing any of them, we pour ourselves into holding on, maintaining, and preserving what we now believe is “ours” to possess and keep. Sadly, the passing of time brings us to the realization that whatever it is we once coveted and treasured tends to lose its appeal in the tarnish of our familiarity and the consequent boredom that usually follows. So we wax nostalgically about what once was ours, and set off looking for something else to equal or top that object or moment of our fleeting joy and passing satisfaction.
This week most of us have been caught up with looking for that time, place, or gathering that will engender in us those moods and feelings we associate with being thankful. That yearning has sent millions of us on vehicular journeys over highways and airways for reunions with family or old friends assembled for our country’s most sacred of civic celebrations, Thanksgiving. The anticipation of such gatherings, recalling Currier and Ives’ jaunts over meadows and through woods where good company and sumptuous feasts await us is powerful. So much so, that it usually succeeds in overruling our reservations about the cost and effort of getting there, the stresses of pulling off the mythic feast, and our unspoken suspicions that it will not measure up to our expectations. For even though we may be able to go home, we can never fully be at home once we’ve left that forever-sacred nest. Too much about the place, the people who once lived there, and we who return has changed, forever, placing it well beyond replication or recovery.
In spite of all this, most of us who have embarked on a Thanksgiving journey, whether to the other side of town or across the continent, understand that even those parts of our story now written in past tense are worth rereading, at least once a year. Family gatherings afford us the chance for recollecting old chapters and editing new ones in the saga of our family script. At the same time they awaken in us a sense of wholeness and belonging that few other moments have the power to convey. That hour or two in which we bask in the embrace of our family reunited for this occasion should make us feel grateful for the abundance of culinary delights spread before us and thankful to be sharing it with those to whom we are linked in name, history and identity. Shouldn’t it? Whether it does or not will depend on what we have brought to the gathering, not on what we receive once we get there. I say this because Thanksgiving is more than a once-and-done occasion each year, and it really has little to do with what greets us on a bounteous table or who meets us around this sumptuous spread. It is, like other great human valuations of the meaning of life, an inside job.
Being thankful, on this or any day, depends on what we bring to life, not what life drops in our lap or lays at our feet. It is a spirit borne from within, an attitude and perspective some people wear like a garment suitable for any occasion or weather forecast, yet on others appears an uncomfortable fit except on the sunniest of days. For living thankfully has no necessary connection to or dependency on the weather outside, be it beautiful or overcast, tranquil or stormy. Thankful people bring to each moment certain preconceptions about what life really is all about, orienting how they see it, what they expect of it and from it, and how they handle both its triumphs and its tragedies. I’m not sure why some folks are more thankful than others. Perhaps they are stoics at heart, or realists who’ve swallowed enough of dregs to understand life in both its sweet and bitter vintages. Of one thing I’m certain: if being thankful was a natural outcome of success, achievement, fame, health, wealth, and popularity, then we Americans would be the happiest, most thankful people on the planet. Judging from the statistics noting the epidemics of our rage, our reliance on psychotherapy and painkillers, and our collective angst—especially when compared with seemingly happy people in far less prosperous places on the planet—there seems little causal connection between what we have and what we truly are. We may talk about being thankful, and even clap our hands—but do we know it, inside?
As one who contends with my own share of down times and existential wonderments, I realize that my own sense of thanksgiving always depends on what I bring to rather than what I receive from any moment. It has little to do with any of the externals that we often mistake for blessing, such as luck, favor or fortune. Being thankful is a before-the-fact perspective, not an after-the-fact realization. It is heard in John Henry Newman’s hope-against-hope petition to be led by the “kindly light, amid the encircling gloom” that he and others have invoked during turbulent sea voyages, after devastating mine disasters, and through the ordeal of those waiting to die in SS concentration camps. It is read in the blind poet George Matheson’s words as he looked inwardly to “trace the rainbow through the rain” of his desperation. And it resounds in the affirmation of the apostle Paul who, in spite of the beatings, imprisonments, and physical handicaps he endured, could encourage the fledgling Christian church in Philippi,
“…for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or want. I can do all this through Him who gives me strength.”
I doubt this is an outlook with which Paul or any of us was born. But it is a way of seeing and feeling that we learn by being around people whose attitudes and personalities accept the half-full, rather than half-empty glasses that life has poured them. You know folks like this and so do I, whether or not we always understand them or see things as they do. But their company is like a tonic for those of us who steer more towards the gloomy rather than sunny side of life’s streets. I, for one, never cease counting my blessings for having been raised by, married into, and lived among souls like this, for they have taught me, as they continue to do, how to tap into the thankfulness that lies inside of me even when the worries and troubles and setbacks of what lie outside pull me into those dark and hopeless cul-de-sacs of envy, despair and bitterness that are so easy to enter and so difficult to vacate.
The tradition of observing a day of thanksgiving is a good and necessary pause button in our calendar, linking us to both a national and familial past that seems more innocent and wholesome in retrospect than the confusions and forebodings of the present. But most of all I’m glad to be reminded that the work of being thankful-—indeed a spiritual effort that most of us need to work on—-lies not in the externals of what we will eat and what games we will watch to overindulgence. For it is an inside job from which our humble gratitude for life itself must and should be expressed, especially among those whom we love and are loved in return. Happy Thanksgiving!
