Free people keep afever

There’s a version of my life that is filled with fresh, local, sustainably-harvested flowers and cloth napkins and just enough of everything I want and need. In that version I somehow have a job that pays for all those things, keeps me out of debt, allows me enough time and emotional energy to spend on meaningful interactions with friends and family, and is still intellectually challenging with a positive and meaningful impact on the world.

Every year I get closer to understanding what brings me joy (and I say, entirely seriously, that Marie Kondo was right about a whole lot) and every year I understand a little bit better that the “what” is in fact “who”.

I have very mixed feelings about Thanksgiving, not dissimilar to my deep unease with Columbus Day. So every year I aim to balance the ‘spend time with friends and family’ angle with the ‘practice of gratitude for the privileges I have’ with a degree of historical acknowledgement about the harms that got us here.

Sometimes what matters is naming the thing, and sitting for a moment with the discomfort of reckoning.