One Beautiful Thing

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from Hibou and Shiloh

On this the night before Thanksgiving, I’m sitting in front of my (video) fireplace in a home freshly spruced up for the holiday.

My puppy is curled at my feet crashed out after a long hard day in doggy day care strategically chosen so I could vacuum without freaking anybody the hell out.

My husband scored a ticket to the late show for a comedian I don’t love, so I’m blissfully alone as my thoughts drift to the eggnog in the refrigerator that I’m just now realizing with something that can only be described as culinary glee that I absolutely can open the carton now instead of saving it for tomorrow.¹

There’s a lot about Thanksgiving to give a person pause:

• the consumption of delicious but irresponsible quantities of butter and sugar;

• the revisionist history too many still accept as the truth about the holiday’s origin;

• and a societal tendency to warp the idea of gratitude into a performative pageant of toxic positivity.

Even still, a holiday that inspires people to true gratitude is a beautiful thing.

True gratitude isn’t about polishing a quick quip about what you’re most grateful for to share at the dinner table.

And true gratitude is definitely not about being militantly cheerful in the face of disappointments or frustrations or losses that gut you.

True gratitude is about weathering life’s deepest downs—feeling disappointed and frustrated and gutted by grief—while also paying attention to the moments in that same life that buoy you, no matter how small.

And if you’re in a period where your losses feel like a yawning hole in your heart, small gratitudes may be all that you can handle, and that’s all right, because small gratitudes accumulate and compound exponentially as long as you’re making a good faith effort to notice the good among the bad.

So make a habit of noticing the small but beautiful moments that pepper our lives.

Notice the perfectly ripe avocado, the puppy gamboling through the park, the particularly fluffy cloud in the sky.

Notice the woman who gets the door for you at the post office because your hands are full. Notice the wonder of the starlings that take flight from their roost in the bushes as you walk past. Notice the kid making faces at you from the car next to yours in gridlocked traffic and muster the playfulness to respond by crossing your eyes.

Notice the perfect creaminess of that illicitly poured eggnog. Notice the percussive perfection of a perfectly clicky keyboard. Notice the joy that comes with hearing a song you loved as a kid sneak up on you in the middle of a CVS.

Notice the rustle of the fallen leaves and the knotted trunk of your favorite tree and the objectively beautiful fact that even Christmas lights that have no busines being strung before Thanksgiving still fill the night with twinkling wonder.

Notice all the things.

Because as we enter the gratitude gauntlet between Thanksgving and Christmas, it’s important to remember that even when we’re heartsick about the depth and breadth of suffering in the world, we can always—always—find one beautiful thing in any given moment, even if all the moment has for us is is a blue sky on an otherwise dreary day.

On this Thanksgiving I raise my illicit eggnog in a toast to tiny moments: May your Thanksgiving be filled with too many small joys for you to count!

1. It’s just us tomorrow, after all. Pardon me while I go pour myself a glass of seasonal joy….