Approaching Thanksgiving

I feel, sometimes and more often than not I suppose, that the potential we have in this life is exponential to the effort we put into living. I have personally found that a life spent following the things that make your heart sing, endeavoring to relieve yourself of possessions and the time and money required to acquire and maintain them, and a healthy dose of traveling so that we can enlighten ourselves not simply to the experience we were born into but the attitudes, horizons and customs of the greater world around us. As Thanksgiving approaches and I will no doubt find myself less frequent a visitor to the Internet as airplanes take me to places sunny and warm and full of endeavors that require no WiFi connection, I thought I might shed a few words from my waist here today with regards to that upcoming, greatest of American holidays.

I am thankful, like a Turkey still living on Black Friday, for my son and his understanding and willingness to have allowed me the freedom to do this traveling over the past year. I know his patience grows thin for the open road these days, and in return for his goodwill I will find us some place where fellow children can be met and counted on to be there in the longrun, where playdates can make themselves a common occurrence, where an actual bed can be the very same place he falls and asleep and wakes up for days into months at a time. I am thankful for his hand massages. I am thankful for his Play Doh sculpture gifts and love of long walks to sleep in tents in forests with me.

I am thankful for Germany, that country with a rather tarnished reputation, but still, I am thankful for its creating my bus and what wonder that feat of engineering has bestowed upon me over the short time I’ve lived and loved in her. I am thankful for the country which produced my greatest great grandparents and gave me my last name, my son his as well.

I am thankful for whatever culmination of childhood events provided me with attitude I possess which indicates no other possibilities for my mind but to follow my heart, for my shoes but to follow my instincts. By reaching for the unattainable I have been given nearly everything I could ever imagine wanting, and none of it came with much of a price tag while all of it came with enough valuable worth to make me know that, while I hope to ripen old through many future decades, if I were to die tomorrow I truly believe I have experienced vast more than my fair share in this world.

Thanksgiving doesn’t call on us to purchase plastic nothing for each and every person in our lives, trading landfill paper wrapped future closet space waste or Goodwill fodder. Thanksgiving doesn’t come stuffed with cheesy canned movie trailers and commercials where bad actors make humanity wonder if they’ll ever live as much as the random odd puppies and candy covered chocolates parade. Thanksgiving celebrates nothing but it’s namesake, sharing food and time and nothing much else is required with family or friends. It doesn’t result in three months of credit card debt. May your days be filled with the family, food and football of the holiday, and if the holiday is truly based on a gesture of initial goodwill between the native men and women of this great Turtle Island continent and my ancestral European dreamchasers, then I am thankful for that and will relish their memory on the shores of Florida’s coast with every ounce of my ability.