Thankfulness

According to Merriam-Webster, Thanksgiving Day is a day appointed for giving thanks for divine goodness—and I concur!  However, Thankfulness is about coming home again to a time when there was a shred of hope while hanging on to that fragile thread of life laden with uncertain signs of suffering which without family and friends we find ourselves living in the shadow of doubt and fear.  It’s about deconstructing old Thanksgiving images of the so-called saintly pilgrims praying with pious Indians preparing for a long cold winter in America.  It’s about remembering the pictures of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin L. King permanently displayed on your mother’s dining room wall with a desire to place a picture of President Barack Obama beside these icons as a living witness of change—and be thankful!

You NOW know that Thanksgiving Day is more than turkey and dressing with all the trimmings; pumpkin pie and turnip greens with hot rolls while listening to cool jazz.  It’s about loved ones sharing their stories, telling old jokes, and remembering your childhood experiences with sweet memories and laughing out loud—and you realize that you must re-construct the image of Thanksgiving with a cultural twist.

It’s in these moments in the midst of your wounded life, filled with anxiety and anticipation—you don’t have to accept a flawed sense of self.  You can come home again!  You can come home, first to yourself and your ideas and then to others who matters most in your life.  So life’s finite existence with all its limits, boundaries and confinements—at home it doesn’t matter!   No matter how accomplished you may appear to the outer world, you experience yourself lacking permission to feel and desire what you feel.  Thus, the pattern of doubt that transcends your consciousness allows you to believe that you are not valued, and yet, when you come home to yourself, family and friends confirms just how valuable you are and how much you are needed in their world.

How do we avoid the powerful currents in life that sweeps us away from our own dreams and aspirations?  What relationship do we have with ourselves?  It is the unknowns in our lives that make us uncomfortable with ourselves.  In many ways, we remain in service to the past.  It’s those repeated “silent instructions” from our parents, grandparents and mentors in our lives.  And then you must admit it is ME and—it is the “Other Person” in ME that holds both a distraction and a painful reality that gets my attention.  But when you come home again, you can start all over again with new ideas, be authentic, think savvy but be humble, define your vision, speak with more clarity, don’t follow the crowd, and be faithful to the dream.