Many established holiday traditions have come under scrutiny in the era of inclusion and reparations, Thanksgiving being one of them. The idea of pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a meal and giving thanks for the abundance of food and safe arrival was certainly not where the story ended.
Colonization, disease, and genocide—which paved the way for the America we live in now—are still in many ways in the process of healing and defining itself in the face of its turbulent past. And yet, come the end of November, supermarkets will run out of turkeys, and happy children will slather their plates with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.
We will not talk about the injustices committed. Instead, we will perhaps say a prayer and express gratitude for our loved ones, the roof over our heads, and the beautiful meal we will share with one another.
But should gratitude always be given for the blessings? Aren’t the curses of history and challenges in our lives responsible for shaping the development of our future more so than the blessings for which we are grateful?
Perhaps this Thanksgiving, we can contemplate the importance of training our minds to be grateful for things that have been hard and painful.
We attempt to avoid uncomfortable truths at all costs, without which we learn nothing. The human mind at rest seeks a reductive, simplified reality for the simple fact that it is easier to navigate.
For example, all cats have four legs. Thomas is a cat; therefore, Thomas has four legs. This distilled and logical proposition allows for a very settling sense of clarity in which we find comfort. Yet, in this comfortable simplicity, something terrible happens. We end up missing all cats that have lost legs; we no longer perceive limping cats because they cease to be cats. And if they cease to be cats and we have not identified them, they no longer belong to our conscious experience.
In the words of the great German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “That which cannot be expressed, cannot be experienced.” And this is how the genocide of the Native people was erased from the experience of white Americans for generations, as they celebrated Thanksgiving in their blissful yet delusional state of gratitude. To feel blessed and grateful is a pure state of being. It is, in essence, an all-good state of being. The human condition, however, is a murky business.
Our world, our history, and our internal experience are in a constant state of change and, therefore, ambivalence. We have conflicting feelings—things are exciting and terrifying at the same time, we love and dislike each other frequently, and we need our loved ones and yet want to be separate.
In the soup of this confusing mixture of emotion, thought, and sensation, we commit terrifying, tremendous, heroic, and monstrous acts.
The discipline to always hold such a complex experience in one’s mind requires dedication and practice. It is, however, arguably the most important practice for the growth of our humanity.
Without recognizing these dichotomies, we exist in a delusional state of black and white. While missing all gradients of gray in the middle, we become blind to the suffering of others. We stop relating to one another and seeing reflections of ourselves in others, thus losing connectivity to the greater whole.
This Thanksgiving, I invite you to practice giving thanks for all the pain and struggle within and around us. This suffering illuminates the path toward betterment, forces us to see things as they are, and allows us to discover the edges of our human potential.
Discomfort is the greatest catalyst for change. spt