A Thanksgiving Toast: Here is to Uncertainty!

As I spent my first Thanksgiving abroad in 5 years, I couldn't but help to feel homesick, lonely and missing out on what is arguably the best US holiday in the annual calendar. There have been many blogs and articles about what Thanksgiving is, its origins, and how Americans come together in a very special way during this last Thursday of every November, so I won't bore you with another version. However, I did want to share with you a wonderful piece from the New York Times that my cousin Ric sent me. It captures the Thanksgiving spirit but also brings to light some of the discussions we have been having recently on the 6 Basic Human Needs, particularly the need for uncertainty (which some of you are still resisting based on your e-mails to me!).


So thank you Uncle Ric for sharing this piece with me and thinking of me as you all sat around the table in Orange County this Thanksgiving. I wish I was there with you! Happy Thanksgiving to all and lets raise a glass to what the future will bring, unbeknownst to you and me...

Published November 25, 2009

EDITORIAL

A Thanksgiving Toast

Sitting down with friends and family today, there will be thanks for the steady currents, flowing out of the past, that have brought us to this table. There will be thanks for the present union and reunion of us all. And there will be prayerful thanks for the future. But it’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning.

What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from? How could we account for these new faces at the Thanksgiving table or for the faces we’re missing this holiday, missing perhaps now all these years?

It will never cease to surprise how the condition of being human means we cannot foretell with any accuracy what next Thanksgiving will bring. We can hope and imagine, and we can fear. But when next Thanksgiving rolls around, we’ll have to take account again, as we do today, of how the unexpected has shaped our lives. That will mean accounting for how it has enriched us, blessed us, with suffering as much as with joy.

That, perhaps, is what all this plenty is for, as you look down the table, to gather up the past and celebrate the present and open us to the future.

There is the short-term future, when there will be room for seconds. Then there is the longer term, a time for blossoming and ripening, for new friends, new family, new love, new hope. Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.