Thanksgiving 2023
Some extemporaneous and not so extemporaneous thoughts on Thanksgiving, as it is my own personal tradition.
I recounted some of the reasons why Thanksgiving had played a large part in my life in last year’s reminiscence of our family’s first Thanksgiving in our newfound country, and how that experience affected how we celebrated Thanksgiving from that point on. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/11/ruminations-thanksgiving-2022.html)
The year before, I reminisced about the Thanksgivings I spent with other gradual students while I was at Georgia Tech, a Thanksgiving where I felt truly met the spirit of the holiday. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/11/ruminations-memorable-thanksgiving.html)
Thanksgiving also signals the end of the Autumn, indicating the end of the harvest season and delivered the signal from Mother Earth that she is preparing for a long dormancy. It elicits a romantic sense of melancholy and longing in me that seduced my mind into the traditional agrarian narrative of the perennial cycles of the seasons.
It is a feeling best evoked by the Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1936 as written by Governor Wilbur Cross of Connecticut. (https://today.uconn.edu/2013/11/the-1936-thanksgiving-proclamation-of-gov-wilbur-cross/#) I have read it without fail on every Thanksgiving, both to remind myself of Governor Cross’ eloquence in the short pronouncement and to give myself the pleasure of immersing myself in Governor Cross’s imagery. It also serves as reminder that a well written piece of official document can be timeless and evocative, despite its function as a perfunctory announcement.
I am surrounded by this tangible sense of the end of the growing season and the beginning of the hard winter to come, as I live in a rural area, and I had watched the planting unfold during the Summer and I had just watched the harvesting of the crops out my window. It happens every year at this time, reminding me of the change in seasons, much as the people who had preceded me had been reminded.
Thanksgiving began in North America as a day of rest and for the farmers getting ready to rest for the winter to give thanks for the blessings of the harvest and of the preceding year. The mythology and lore of the day of thanks is not an event that is uniquely North American. The day of Thanksgiving is celebrated in many cultures around the world, all related to the celebration of the harvest, which is the most important aspect of Thanksgiving is the significance of its existence. The significance comes from the desire and necessity to express gratitude for the harvest, abundant or not.
During my ruminations about gratitude and its relationship with the Thanksgiving holiday, I asked myself some questions. The first question was: who are we thanking? For those of the religious persuasion, it is to their God or gods. But even those who don’t have a religious affiliation, the need to express thanks are also a part of their natural behavior. Even without a deity to worship, many are expressing thanks to the great unknown, the part of reality that is uncertain, unknown, and random. Depending on the tradition, almost all religions, philosophies, cultures, and societies have made thankfulness a major part of their belief system. A recognition of all that is unknowable and unpredictable in our existence. Which is why a day of thanksgiving is so ubiquitous around the world.
It is our way of acknowledging the reality that we inhabit, that it is not deterministic and never as understood as we had presumed. Many of the events that happen to our lives in the reality that we inhabit are rarely known a priori. We give thanks for the unexpectedly good things that happen to us, and we give thanks for the unexpectedly bad things that did not happen to us, or did happen to us but we give thanks anyways for having survived those bad things. The feeling of gratitude is universal, because there are more unknowns, uncertainties, and randomness than we know or care to admit.
How we give thanks is also an interesting idea. A day set aside specifically for expressing gratitude is one very visible way of accomplishing that goal. It forces a pause in our daily lives for the expressed purpose of contemplating and ruminating about gratitude upon our lives. It gives us all a chance to think about our place in the vast unknown reality, putting our lives into a perspective that our egocentric world view can accept, internalize, and understand.
Yet this kind of acknowledgement also carries a downside. By defining a specific day and a specific timeframe devoted strictly to gratitude, we are not only focusing our attention and energies on that day and timeframe, we are also tacitly giving ourselves permission to not regularly think about the idea of showing gratitude and relegating that gratitude to the peripheral parts of our consciousness. It is not a deliberate nor conscious relegation, it has more to do with how we live our lives and how the pace and pressures of our lives have forced us to make decisions about the relative amounts of attention that we devote to the uncountably many issues, and tasks that occupies our minds.
A day devoted to thankfulness and gratitude is necessary, to remind us of how well we are dealing with the capriciousness of real life. But I have a hard time believing that treating thankfulness and gratitude as an occasional occurrence is good for our souls and for our psychic well-being. Giving thanks is an exercise in humility, it is our celebration of our existence in a vast and unpredictable reality, it is our recognition of the vastness of the universe as well as acknowledging how small and limited our reference is with respect to reality.
Gratitude needs to be a process, a practice, and a habit. It needs to transcend what we have always assumed and taken for granted. Gratitude needs to be ever-present and unconscious. It is best when we have internalized it within our mind so that we don’t need to be deliberately or consciously thankful but is integrated so deeply within our internal selves that we are thankful all the time, naturally and unbidden. Gratitude becomes a part of our natural flow.
This, of course, does not mean that we need to do away with formal and recognized events like Thanksgiving, the day that our cultures had designated for gratitude. We need to be grateful all the time, consciously during the dedicated days, and subconsciously all the other days.
That is my thought for this year. I am grateful for living in this time and space and I am grateful for everyone that has made me a part of their orbit and for them to be a part of my orbit.
I am ungirding myself in preparation for the tryptophan induced coma, drooling, and doing the rubbernecked headbob while pretending to be watching some really bad football.
I bid you a very happy Thanksgiving.