Thanksgiving morning has a strange quiet to it, a kind of hush that feels older than the holiday itself. The world seems to pause in a way it never does on any other Thursday.
Light falls differently.
Sounds carry a little too far.
The corners of rooms feel deeper than usual.
Does my hair hurt?
Nothing is wrong. Nothing is off. Nothing?
Yet something in the air waits...as if listening.
People say “Happy Thanksgiving” as if the words themselves matter. Maybe they do, maybe they do not.
A short signal interruption here...
From Robert Reich's Office Hours: How will you deal with your right-wing “Uncle Bob” at Thanksgiving? Several possible techniques.
Now the static clears...
Nothing is wrong. Nothing is off. Nothing?
Yet something in the air waits...as if listening.
I have always felt that on days like this, the ordinary world thins. Not in a dramatic way. More like the way a deep lake looks still on the surface, even though you sense an impossible depth beneath.
Have you ever looked to your feet, wondering, fear simmering just below the surface, tentatively wondering how you do not pass through the molecules holding you up?
It is just enough to make you notice details you would normally walk right past.
Steam rising from a cup of coffee that seems to twist with intention?
Or tea descending into Brownian Motion until the improbably descends all around you?
A shadow on the wall holds its shape too long.
A draft moves through the house as if it knows every room better than you ever will.
You look around and tell yourself...it's nothing?
And of course, of course it is. Nothing.
Right?
Still, mornings like this remind you there are vast spaces just outside the frame of human comfort. Spaces indifferent to turkeys, grocery lists, family schedules, or whatever trouble the week has dragged in behind it. There's a quiet immensity under everything that rarely stirs, yet you can sense it in the way a dog senses thunder long before the first rumble.
Or a turkey senses the farmer arriving around Thanksgiving.
For on Thanksgiving, that immensity feels close enough to touch.
The Table as a Little Island
By the time everyone sits at the table, much of the day having burned itself off, that feeling has softened, but it's not quite gone. Will it ever be?
Voices overlap.
Laughter lifts the ceiling. Are the walls elongating?
Plates clatter like small shields against whatever watches from just outside the glow of the dining room lights.
There's comfort in this.
There's defiance in it too.
We sit together and share food as if declaring that the familiar matters. That warmth matters. That even when life feels stretched too thin, the world too heavy, we carve out a small bright island and keep it for ourselves. Together.
In moments alone, together, within ourselves. For we can be a community of one.
In moments like this, you can almost imagine the darkness retreating.
Not defeated. Just content to wait for another day. A day off, if you will.
The Return of the Ordinary
At some point, something breaks the spell.
A dropped fork.
A child yelling from another room.
A dish that refuses to be passed without sloshing.
Or a wine glass, blood wine? Or would white win be...safer?
And just like that, the house returns to itself.
Snapping reality to bear us once again.
The corners shrinking back to normal size.
The air stops listening.
The world resumes its usual distance.
What remains is something simple and honest.
People talking.
People eating.
People remembering that, despite everything swirling outside our little human circle, these ordinary moments are still worth protecting.
What Thanksgiving Reminds Me
The world feels rough lately.
Too many headlines, too many arguments, too much confusion, obfuscation, attempts to make obvious reality something...other. Too many days that seem to stack up like weights. It's easy to believe we're falling toward something unpleasant, something we have no name for and no plan to stop.
But then Thanksgiving arrives, and for a few hours the world feels familiar again. Warm food. Familiar faces. A sense that life, for all its troubles, is still livable. Still worth savoring.
Even if we are alone. Memories, shared past reality, potential futures sit in wait.
Because whatever deep currents move beneath the everyday surface, whatever quiet immensities wait beyond the edges of our small routines, they do not own US.
Not today.
Today we acknowledge that things could be far worse than they are.
Today we choose gratitude not because everything is perfect, but because the alternative is to let the darkness fill the whole horizon.
Thanksgiving reminds me that the light we create around a shared table is not small at all.
It is enough.
And on some days like these, like this...enough IS everything.
No matter where you are, or whether this day holds meaning for you, I wish you a quiet corner of warmth, a small bright moment, and the reminder that even in strange times, we are still here.
Back to what I said at the top, people say “Happy Thanksgiving” as if the words themselves matter. Maybe they do, maybe they do not. What matters is the intention carried beneath them. The wish for warmth, for company, for a moment where the world feels less sharp at the edges.
So here it is, offered plainly.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
No comments:
Post a Comment