True Gratitude: Wisdom in the Comics — Thanksgiving 2024

Wizard of Id’s Spook and Turnkey made a good point last Sunday.

Gratitude is an option, even when life’s bowl of cherries seems filled with pits.

Sometimes I don’t feel particularly grateful, that’s putting it mildly; but I can always be grateful, if I remember that just being alive is a gift from God: and that everything else is gravy.

Remembering to remember — that’s tricky. For me, at any rate.

Decades of undiagnosed depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and/or autism spectrum disorder, a hip that didn’t grow right, and assorted other imperfections —

I’ve got any number of excuses for fashionable melancholy. I see it’s been three years since I talked about that:

• “Reading, Writing, Preferences, Priorities, and Acts 1:8” (November 20, 2021)
  • Attitudes

Although I’m pretty good at seeing dark linings in every sliver cloud, I don’t see the point in peddling doom and gloom.

Even if that’s become a traditional indicator of intelligence and insight:

“…the student of eighteenth-century melancholy is faced with a problem: for much of the period, melancholy was frothily fashionable, a condition that often seemed less of an illness and more of a blessing for the budding poet, wilting lady wishing to show off her latest nightdress, or anyone who desired to seem in the slightest bit sensitive or clever….”
(“Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century,” Fashionable Melancholy, Abstract, Clark Lawlor (2011) via Springer Link)

Fashionable melancholy’s flip side, pretending that everything’s fine, doesn’t make sense, either: and that’s another topic.

So I’ll express my hope that you have a good Thanksgiving Day — or November 28th, if my country’s turkey fest isn’t part of your week — see if I can find coverage of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade online, and wrap this up with the usual vaguely-related list of posts:

• “Cancer Concerns, Prayer, and My Family“
  (April 17, 2024)
• “Saints, Depression, Assumptions, and Me“
  (March 23, 2024)
• “Thanksgiving 2023: Still Being Thankful“
  (November 23, 2023)
• “Thanksgiving and Two Turkeys: A Continuing Tale“
  (November 24, 2022)
• “Thanksgiving Weekend 2021: Puritans, Pandemic and Me“
  (November 27, 2021)