Happy Thanksgiving

I have always truly loved Thanksgiving. No one is excluded from that celebration. It doesn't matter what you believe in or how many gifts you can afford. You can dress up if you want to, but you don't have to. You can watch a great parade from the comfort of your own home. Food, family, friends, gratitude — everything a holiday should be. The only thing I don't like is that, in these parts at least, Thanksgiving often signals the end of golf season and the beginning of snow season.

I'd like to share an excerpt from the greeting I wrote for the November 2016 edition of our newsletter.

Happy Thanksgiving. I send my best wishes to you all.

Roland

***

I've spent enough time in less luxurious places — the former USSR, Mexico, the islands of Micronesia — to be thankful for what I have and for what surrounds me. It's still so easy to take it all for granted, so easy to pay attention to what we don't have, what we feel we should have, but I've known enough difficulty in my life to be grateful for the small mercies, even things as basic as a mostly painless day, a good conversation, a solid night's sleep, a meal with friends.

Though not unique in this regard, the writing business is one in which it's particularly easy to place envy before gratitude. There's no empirical standard by which to measure one's ability, so it's tempting to look at other writers and think "I should have won that prize, been given that healthy advance, been praised in a review like that one."

I do what I can to keep those thoughts at bay. I'm mostly a glass-half-full kind of person anyway, and that attitude carries over into my working life. I know how lucky I've been in the writing world. Yes, I've worked hard at it for almost forty years, and yes, Amanda and I have taken and continue to take some big risks in pursuit of the artistic life, but I've been lucky. I know writers with more talent who have not had even my modest amount of success, or who've been ignored entirely by the New York book-making machine.

I have a wonderful family, decent health these days, good friends. I live in a place where — unlike so many who lived in the USSR and still live in places like it in the world - I can go to sleep at night confident that someone won't knock on my door and drag me away to be interrogated or sent to the camps; a place — unlike the outer islands of Chuuk — where, if I'm ill or injured, I know I can get medicine or see a doctor almost immediately. Except for intentional fasts, I've never been truly hungry, not for a day. My work — not without its stresses and frustrations — allows me to spend a lot of time with Amanda and the girls, to play golf or hit the gym on a weekday, or write from breakfast until bed, my choice. And I've had a lot of wonderful letters from readers — this past week especially, for some reason — and they always bring with them a little dose of feel-good and the sense that I am where I'm supposed to be.

And so, as we approach Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, I send out a heartfelt thank-you to my family and my readers and also to the greater forces that are not of this earth.

In the midst of that gratitude, it's true that, for me and millions of others, the election was shocking and disappointing. I worry about the future of democracy in a country where a candidate can win by two million votes and lose an election. And I worry even more about the reports of hate crimes.

I wonder if these people who spray-paint swastikas on cars and buildings really have any sense of the vicious history that symbol represents. For Italian practice, I'm reading Se Questo e' un Uomo, (SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ) Primo Levi's account of being sent to Auschwitz as an Italian Jew. Maybe the swastika-painters and those who encourage and applaud them should spend a day, one day, in the conditions Levi experienced for almost a year — being starved, humiliated, brutalized and tormented by sadistic camp guards and an evil system, and see if they truly wish to stand behind that symbol and terrify others with it.

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi

In my own smaller circle, I will try to be as kind and caring and sane as I can possibly be, to compensate, in a tiny way, for some of the violence and anger and near-insanity that stains our streets.

Other people of politics similar to my own, counsel anger and activism. I don't see much evidence that anger has ever played a positive role in human history. The most successful opponents of oppression and bigotry, it seems to me, were persistent and brave, not furious. Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Ki, Vaclav Havel, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela in his later life, all may have been angry, but anger didn't rule them and hatred didn't rule them.

Activism is another story. I think we all have to decide, whatever our political views, how active we want to be, and for which causes. I would just like to see American activism without enmity.

One thing I'd like to write more about — I've done this already to a small extent — is the tendency in our society to label each other, to place each other into boxes, to reduce very complicated issues to a slogan on a bumper sticker. I have a lot of compassion for those people who belong to groups that have historically been oppressed, insulted, or ignored. I completely support and will stand up for their desire to be treated fairly.

And I think it's essential to speak up about evil and inequity.

But the way in which we conduct that conversation — on both sides — matters very much. Unless we're talking about hate-groups, you can't really know or judge a person by what segment of society he or she belongs to. I've met good and bad people from every group imaginable, Italian Americans, Russians, gays, African Americans, Mexicans, Micronesians, men, women, old, young, educated, uneducated, conservative, liberal, vegetarian, carnivore, atheist, believer; I've even known a few golfers I don't like.

What I try to do is to see each person as a human being first, and only secondarily as a figure in a certain category. I try to start from a place of giving that person respect, according to the most important moral guideline I've ever heard — do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron's latest book, LIVING BEAUTIFULLY, she talks about being a 'warrior', and defines that as someone who doesn't close himself or herself off to other people, who keeps trying, who criticizes when criticism is called for, and acts when action is called for, but doesn't reject the "Other" by some panicky self-protection reflex or because of a buried psychological trigger that has little to do with the actual moment. I see that kind of damaging behavior on both sides of the political spectrum, and feel the urge toward it in myself. Look where it's gotten us: to a bitterly divided nation.

Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön

"Label me and you negate me," Martin Buber said in his great book I AND THOU. And yet it seems we are labeling each other more and more. So-and-so is a white male. So-and-so is a black lesbian. So-and-so is a liberal, a right-winger, a feminist, a member of the 1%, a welfare recipient, an addict. On one level those descriptions have some usefulness. But, too often, they fuel a righteous anger and lead to judgment and hatred.

I and Thou by Martin Buber

I want to operate below or beyond that level and have this as my first thought: so-and-so is a human being. I'm trying to resist the temptation to label, and all the judgments that immediately follow, because I've come to believe that therein lies the cause of most of our troubles.

That's my promise for the next four years and beyond. Try to see through the label to the human essence, try to see the similarities, not the differences. Start there. If I feel criticism or censure is due, I'll act accordingly. If something troubles me enough, I'll go out in the streets, or write about it as bravely as I can, or both.

But, I want to at least try to start from a place of hope, not fear; kindness, not hatred; understanding, not ridicule.

Mockery, it has always seemed to me, is the province of the insecure. Humor, it has always seemed to me, is the solace of the sane.

Writing helps, because when you make or describe characters you have to get beyond the surface, carry them past the cliche, and it dawns on you after a while that we are all tremendously complex beings, some evil, some good, some mixed, but each carrying his or her burden of difficulties, each marred by flaws and weaknesses.

Every single soul pushes a cart of invisible baggage through the world — addiction, physical pain, emotional duress, the scars of abuse or family dysfunction, the buzz of chronic anxiety, the pain of divorce or abandonment, a crippling overabundance of narcissism or self-love, the suffering or early loss of those close to us, the difficulties of old age, the shortcomings of the society in which we live.

Though we like to think so, it seems to me that we very rarely get everything right - including the sense that our political opponents get everything wrong.

This idea of seeing each person as a human being first is an idealistic approach to personal interaction, I know that. It's so much more fun to let go of that ideal, brand the other side as inferior or evil, and feel righteous all the time as we battle and scream.

When I write these words, when I think the thoughts behind them, a little voice inside mutters, "But you can't live up to this, you don't live up to this." True enough, I don't, but I'll never agree that I can't. Until I get to my last breath, I don't want to set up artificial limits on what I might learn in this life. I don't want to take my worst and most petty instincts and let them dictate how I behave.

As I may have said before in these notes, I like to remember something I heard at the Providence Zen Center when I made a brief retreat there years ago. The late, Zen master Seung Sahn happened to be visiting - more good luck for me (there is fair bit of him in the character Rinpoche) — and in response to someone who complained about the difficulty of meditating and leading a pure life, he said these three memorable words:

"Try, only try."

I do try. To a greater or less degree, most of the people I know are also trying. That, it seems to me, is why we are here.
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Published on November 26, 2019 19:17
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