Thanksgiving Day is without a doubt my favorite cultural holiday.
Thanksgiving Day is without a doubt my favorite cultural holiday.
For me, it is filled with peace, family, good food, football, sublime fall weather and nostalgia, the latter being a preferred indulgence of mine.
I still can smell the house of my paternal grandparents. I can still hear the sound of my feet on the hardwood floor and the slight rattle of the carnival glass lamp on the television as you walked by. I can still see my grandfather’s bowed head as he prayed the blessing on the feast before us.
I mostly think of the various Thanksgiving foods as mere vehicles to get more gravy in my mouth. I’ve never learned to make gravy, but I make it a point to cultivate relationships with women who do know how.
And the whole culinary exercise is really just aimed at my coup de grace — turkey soup! That I do know how to make.
I like Thanksgiving, too, because it’s the one American holiday we haven’t figured out how to cheapen and exploit commercially. There’s not a lot of pretense.
Come over. We cook. Sit down. We eat ourselves silly. Throw the football in the backyard. Fall asleep on the couch in an L-tryptophan coma.
Oh yeah. And give thanks. Practice gratitude.
Of all the ways I might measure my character and spiritual health on any given day, the most telling, weighty and decisive measure, I think, is gratitude. I don’t mean the feeling of gratitude. I mean the practice of gratitude.
Gratitude is a discipline. It’s not a feeling.
Oh sure, like everyone, I am capable of spontaneous grateful feelings. When I’m surprised by an unexpected gesture of generosity, when my head turns to some beatific tableau in nature; yes, I feel the flood of gratitude.
But, as a discipline, gratitude means paying attention.
It means dismantling all the ego-arguments of what I deserve. Put simply, to plumb the depths of gratitude requires first that I achieve some semblance of working humility. The singular most beautiful parts of being human are never earned, deserved or merited.
They just happen.
I like being fortunate more than deserved. I like being grateful more than being merited. Humility is the only door through which gratitude will pass. And, without gratitude, I whine a lot. I complain a lot. I become ridiculously melancholy. I alienate myself from ways the world (not to mention my family and friends) are inviting me to belong.
My dear friend, Jennifer, sends me a song by John Bucchino:
“I’ve got a roof over my head/ I’ve got a warm place to sleep/ Some nights I lie awake counting gifts/ Instead of counting sheep.
I’ve got a heart that can hold love/ I’ve got a mind that can think/ There may be times when I lose the light/ And then my spirit sinks/ But I can’t stay depressed/ When I remember how I’m blessed/ Grateful, grateful, truly grateful I am.”
I see myself sitting at the feet of my maternal great-grandmother. She smelled like talcum powder. She would sing, with a voice like an irradiated seal bitten in half by a great white shark:
“Count your blessings/Name them one by one/ Count your blessings/ See what God hath done!”
Having a hard time finding gratitude?
Go here, and listen to this newly widowed man be grateful for the brief moments he was afforded with his son: http://bit.ly/1wuqWVG.
Gratitude is never more powerful than in the midst of hardship and suffering. When it would be so much easier — and understandable — to indulge bitterness, alienation and self-pity.
Life is difficult.
Damn hard.
But, amidst the sufferings, we’re mining for gratitude. I smiled when I heard a recent bit from comedian Louis C.K.: “Do you ever stop to think what you get with a basic life? For starters, we get to live on this planet, not those other eight really (expletive) planets.”
It’s not “count your many merits,” or “count your many entitlements,” or “submit your many claims,” or “inventory everything you deserve.”
It’s count your many blessings!
We decide where to place our attention. On Thursday, you can give your attention to what is missing. What has been lost. Or … you can pay attention to the richness of what is there.
Right in front of you.
“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God.” (I Thessalonians, 5:18)
Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of “Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing” (Stephens Press). Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.