I wish all of you who may read this a Happy Thanksgiving! But I especially salute those of you who have had your children move away, for whom reflecting on lives led this year brings little joy and who wake up alone in bed or worth someone with whom you once felt more secure than you do now. Holidays can be tough for many of us — very tough indeed. It is OK to admit that fact. It is also good to seize the opportunities to do as much good, find and express as much joy and sanctify as many moments as possible. For some of us, realizing the limits on fun and pleasure and finding the fun and pleasure we can are both part
I spent much of yesterday, not most but much, visiting with family. But I did not take any pictures that I can add to this blog post. So there may be some editing in of material from a Thanksgiving Eve Party and gumbo dinner with the immediate family this evening  — the evening before Thanksgiving Day. I went to morning mass today and hope to make another morning mass tomorrow. But the rest of the day is likely to be fairly anticlimactic. I have decided not to attend an extended family gathering and just to spend the day mostly on my own. Who knows what exactly will happen. I just could not put the pieces together for a different outcome this year. There will be no lack of things to occupy my time. I have quite a number of job applications open or potentially open in distant places.
Thursday is Thanksgiving Day. I have blogged about that holiday before here, here and here. As well as discussing it on other years and in other posts. But every year has its unique qualities. This year certainly does. Â For me this very bad year is likely to get worse but the holidays are always a crisis not in the sense of being bad — but rather in the way that the word crisis can mean something that can be good or bad. and this year they are a crisis I am less prepared to meet than ever before. But I do rejoice in the visits I share and I do dare to hope for something that will put a different aspect, quality and complexion on my life. I hope for something that will make it possible to look at the fast approaching 2017 with hope. I will do what I can to make the most out of the Holidays within reason and sanity.
The world can be a busy and confusing place. There is nothing about it that is conducive to very simplistic assessment as far as much of the world can measure and yet there is only one way that one can be spending one’s time. Â we may try to multi-task but actually to a remarkable degree we each choose or tacitly consent to be engaged in a particular set of actions at any given time. That means we are not engaged in all the myriad other actions. The time finally runs out on many of the paths we could have hoped to pursue and as we age we see the ever more limited set of options facing back at us. For me this is a bit more extreme than for many other people. I am perhaps precipitously stumbling toward dissolution I am not much enjoying the trip either. But the election has meant the reshuffling of possibilities and it is possible that in the emerging new order some things will get better for me. Â I can theorize how that might occur — but I cannot predict that it will occur.
I wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving! No matter who you are — even my fellow relatively lonely friends that I said I would not be hanging out with on the day itself. Even if the football games, masses and Macy’s Parade are not available to you and you are reading this — I hope you can find some joy. I honor all who invite an extra person to their table, who bring baskets to those with less and who help a struggling single parent or large and underemployed family to have a feast — God Bless all of you.
In the end, we all have alot to be thankful for and we hope to be able to focus on that truth for part of one fine holiday…
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