Birds

Tradition

Sometimes a tradition will have been repeated so often that our capacities for automation get involved and detach us from the holiday. Like the woman last night as she seated us at a table saying Thanksgiving is such a bother, there are many that feel it as an intrusion, a set of obligations that like Christmas, cost time and money.

The rituals we observe are just the shell, much of the content hollowed out by repetition. The conversations about how much better the holidays were when we were kids are symptom of the need to reinvigorate the Thanks at the middle of the event.

Recently, the TedTalks Radio hour did a program on joy. What stuck in my head afterwards was what one speaker said of the present-centeredness of joy. Where happiness is a sustained state, the quality of joy attends a particular moment, the way the light hits the greenish bird singing on the wire, the deer that emerge behind the house at just the moment when I’m feeling down. Joy accompanies the fleeting harmonizing of the world in a moment of sensory perfection. A different speaker talked about clouds as providing so much variety in collaboration with sunlight, so many opportunities to see something beautiful. 

Our thoughts often keep us from full attention to the sensory world. Thanksgiving could be a day of alertness to what I tend to call moments of grace which as the speaker on joy said are around in abundance all the time. Attuned to not just taste and smell but where the spirit lifts at the sight of what fleetingly captures full attention.

“Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required.” (Anne Enright, The Green Road). Nourishing the deeper self is about attention. For Thanksgiving, gratitude for the good that we’ve received and attention to the possibilities of joy at any moment in the tastes, smells, sounds and sights of the day.  A sunset that takes your breath away is such a frequently available moment, why not spend more time looking up?