Thanksgiving (In Today's World)

Be thankful for all those who have helped you to grow--
 your teachers, parents, employers, friends, spiritual guides,
and others, acknowledging them by name.  Be thankful for
the good books which you have read, inspiring sermons and
talks you have heard, as well as your own notebooks and journals.

Finally, be thankful for the challenge of your own personal future.
Be thankful for your dreams, your ideals, your hopes.
There are unlimited possibilities ahead.   --Wilferd A. Peterson


Thanksgiving day comes tomorrow in the United States, and I have to say that it's difficult to think about sitting around a table being grateful for all that we have when there are so many people in the country sitting in cells, facing deportation, even if they've been contributing members of our society for years or even decades, just because they got a traffic ticket ten years ago.  They're facing deportation to countries they've never been in, where they have no family or friends to support them.

It's hard to focus on my own Thanksgiving when I know that so many people are going to lose health insurance because they can't afford it any more, and that so many people can't even afford to do their food shopping these days.  Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs this calendar year, so they're not going to be able to furnish their normal Thanksgiving day dinner--much less provide their families with many of the things that make for a "normal" Christmas.  And that's just in the States--we still have the horrors of Gaza and the Ukraine to consider, among many other ways in which people are suffering in this world of ours.

Of course, Thanksgiving day can be wonderful for me if I forget these people and the trials they're going through, but it's impossible to do that and still have a feeling of connection to all humanity.  I'm a part of humanity, not a little island all on my own.  "No man [person] is an island entire of itself," wrote John Donne; "every man [person] is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."  And if I am a part of humanity, then other people's suffering will affect me--it's simply one of the effects of empathy and compassion.

That doesn't mean that I have to be miserable, though, thinking about how others are suffering.  But it does mean that when I think of myself as a part of the whole, and I know that many who are also part of that same whole are suffering greatly, it's important that I keep them in mind, that I keep them in my heart, that I keep them in my prayers, however I choose to pray.  I am thankful--extremely thankful--that I have enough money and other resources to wake up each morning in safety, and that I don't face any world-changing threats to the life I'm living at the moment.  I can give thanks for what I have, but I need to recognize that it wouldn't take all that much to put me in a desperate situation, for then I can feel more empathy and compassion for those who are suffering, and I can look for ways that I can take little actions that might help them make their ways through difficult times.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday, and I most definitely will be thankful tomorrow (as I try to be every day).  But in that thankfulness will be more than just a bit of sadness and frustration as I think of the millions of my fellow human beings who are struggling and suffering.  I don't want to let that thought diminish my own gratitude, of course, for the things and the people I have in my life, but I don't want to be so strongly focused on the blessings that I have that I forget about the people whose blessings are much less abundant than mine.  I hope that everyone is in my prayers and thoughts tomorrow, for love is, of course, what makes the world go 'round, and my conscious awareness of the struggles of others is definitely a show of love.  The world is rarely moved in great ways to make great changes; rather, it's nudged in healthier and more loving directions by the many prayers and small actions that we all can say and take each day.

Taking Things for Granted--A Paragraph a Day

Often when I'm teaching my World Studies course we learn about people living in cultures that have very few of the luxuries that we tend to take for granted.  In this world today, there are millions of people living without electricity in their homes, without running water in their homes, without hope for jobs that would allow them to improve their situations.  There are millions of people without families, without the opportunity to go to school, without enough food to meet their nutritional needs today.  Yes, today.  Twenty-five thousand people on this planet will die of starvation or starvation-related causes today.  Knowing these things, I can let them overwhelm me and get a feeling of hopelessness that could make me very unhappy, or I can use this knowledge to help me to foster my appreciation for the things that I do have, the blessings that are present in my life in so many ways.  I obviously can't ignore the fact that there's much misery in the world, and I do my best with my limited resources to contribute to bettering the world, but I can't do it all.  What I can do is not squander the gifts by not appreciating them.  I can allow gratitude to be an important part of my life and not take for granted anything that I have.

Dinner Time--A Paragraph a Day

Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted--
a paved road or a washing machine?  If you concentrate on finding
what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life
will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.   -Harold Kushner


We're about to eat dinner, and though it seems like a pretty normal thing for the most part, it's something that I'm very grateful for.  I've had times in my life when I didn't have all that much to eat, and I pretty much didn't know where my next meal was coming from or what it might be.  There have been times when I've bought some bread and a block of cheese and lived off of that for several days, simply because that was all I could afford.  Nowadays, food is plentiful, and I don't really have any possibility of not having a meal (though who knows what may happen tomorrow!), but I try to keep in mind just how important it is to be grateful for this fact.  I have enough to eat, and that's more than a whole lot of people on this planet can say--it's estimated that 25,000 people die every day from starvation and causes related to malnourishment, yet I live in a land of plenty and I have the means of making sure that I have all the food I need.  Heck, we even throw some food away sometimes, though we do make a strong effort to avoid doing so.  But when I sit down to dinner, I make an effort always to be thankful for the fact that I have a dinner to sit down to, and I truly believe that that gratitude is one of the things that makes my life richer.

A Nice Warm Home--A Paragraph a Day

My wife and I went for a walk in the cold a couple of hours ago, and it was wonderful.  It isn't a terribly cold day, and though there was a wind, it wasn't a terribly cold or heavy one.  We had a very nice walk, and even better, when we got home, we were greeted by warmth and coziness, something that I never cease to be grateful for.  It would be very easy, of course, to take such a thing for granted, to assume that the cozy home is there for us always, that we somehow deserve it--even though literally billions of people on this planet don't have such a thing.  I appreciate the fact that I appreciate the warmth, too, especially when I see what's just happened in Turkey and Syria and I think about what those people must be going through.  Many of them have lost everything, including loved ones, and I still have a comfortable, warm home to sit in and write these words.  I hope that I never lose the ability to appreciate that which I have--even those things that seem rather mundane or normal.  We all have many blessings in our lives, and it's our choice whether we appreciate them or not, whether we allow them to enrich our perspective or allow ourselves to grow jaded and unappreciative.  It really is up to each one of us.

The Way Things Seem

I've found in life that the ways that things seem to be very often aren't actually the ways that things are.  We bring so many of our own biases and prejudices and desires into what we see that we tend to see things in the ways that we want to see them, or through a lens that distorts reality so significantly that the view that we have is warped, at best.

As a teacher, I see this constantly.  The young person who seems to be screwing around to get attention is sometimes dealing with trauma at home, and acting out their emotions in a place where it's safe to do so.  The student who seems to not be studying at all may be sleep deprived, or have poor eyesight, or have a learning difference that makes a particular topic almost impossible to learn.  The student who doesn't seem to care at all may be withdrawn because of relationship difficulties in the family, up to and including being abused by a parent.

We've all heard the saying, "Things aren't always what they seem."  From my experience, I would amend that statement to read, "Things are rarely what they seem."

This is Thanksgiving week, and here in the States, we have a beautiful holiday to celebrate on Thursday.  This day's focus on gratitude gives us an opportunity to think more deeply about thankfulness, about appreciation.  It gives us a chance not just to count our blessings, but to ponder them.  Why do we consider them blessings?  Why do we not consider other things blessings?

There are many people who have kept the same job for decades and have fallen into a rut of repetition that makes them miserable.  Is the steady job and the paycheck really a "blessing," then?  Others have been fired from their jobs through no fault of their own and ended up finding something else, something better that inspires them more and rekindles passion for their work.  Was being fired from the job really a "curse," then?  Or was it a bigger blessing than the steady job and pay that would have led to tedium and unhappiness?

Of course, a steady job with good pay can be a huge blessing.  But that isn't always the case, is it?

This Thanksgiving, I'm going to challenge myself to look for the blessings in the supposed curses, the positive in the seeming negative.  I'm going to do my best to find a reason to be thankful for everything in my life, with the knowledge that I have no idea what kinds of benefits my current situations will bring me in the future.  Perhaps I'm not too fond of my job, but the person I meet there three months from now is going to show me how to open some other doors that will be much more beneficial to me than the ones I see now.

This Thanksgiving, I'm going to try to be thankful without condition.  I'm going to try to see the good and the positive in everything, knowing as I do that even things that begin with evil can bear positive outcomes (I'm thinking about the war in the Ukraine now--a war that is inexcusable and that was begun with evil intentions).

I'm going to be thankful for all that I've had in life, all that I do have in life, and all that I shall have later in life.  Because my thankfulness--or lack of it--is completely up to me.

You can visit our page on Thanksgiving by clicking here.