thanksgiving '11

The cliche thing to do on Thanksgiving is write about things you're thankful for. Because I am on a time constraint, and because I'm too lazy to come up with anything spectacular, here are a few things that I am legitimately thankful for. Note: these are things I'm actually thankful for, not things I should be thankful for. All of these things are good, but you won't find listed, for example, thankfulness for the fact that I have food in my stomach and a roof over my head. I live in a first-world country and feel entitled to such privileges, these aren't concerns of mine. It's entirely selfish, but that's the way it is. Now for those things I'm legitimately thankful for: my family, especially my little sister; my friends, here in Cincinnati and abroad; and I'm thankful for all the people with whom I live: Rob & Mandy, Blake, Amos, and (of course) Ams. I'm thankful that I have a good job where I make decent money and have fun with the people I work with, and I'm thankful for places like The Anchor where I can escape and drink coffee and orange juice and write, like I'm doing right now with this blog post.

There. I got that out of the way.

It took clenched teeth and gritty resolve, but we did it.

Cliche blog posts FTW.

Now for a deeper tangent: a telescopic look at thankfulness. On Thanksgiving we're primarily focused on those things we're thankful for now. But thankfulness doesn't--or shouldn't--burn itself out in matters of the present. We ought to be thankful for those things in our past, those good memories and cherished friendships and old lovers and those things we went through that have shaped us for better. Our thankfulness should stretch past the present into the future, into a thankfulness for all the blessings and strokes of luck that are to come our way, a thankfulness for what the future holds (while hoping that future's good). Admittedly those with no concept of an afterlife, those without any hope of a world reborn, may find such forward-looking thankfulness laughable. But I think that we should try and be thankful for those things we have as well as those things we don't have, thankful for what's behind and for what's ahead. Maybe Thanksgiving's not just about figuring out what you're thankful for; maybe we can step into the shoes of the first settlers with their first thanksgiving, settlers looking back on a treacherous journey and looking forward into the terrifying unknown, and celebrating in the moment the fact that between the past and the future, amidst the ongoing journey, they're not doing this alone but with others. I like that take.