My free Thanksgiving yoga class is linked here.
It’s Thanksgiving so I wrote a list of things I’m grateful for.
Then I realized that to feel gratitude for things is also, in some way, to be attached to them. There’s a balance to be struck between delighting in Mick Jagger’s stage presence, for example, and likewise, remembering that everything passes. Even our breath, eventually, passes off into nothing.
But it’s that onion skin, that cigarette paper, between knowing that life ends, and being grateful for the abundance and rareness of the world, where the magic happens. Isn’t it?
For everything I list, there’s also awareness that there are other things I’ve forgotten or omitted. That my gratitude is as limitless as my time on this earth and likewise, in the grand scheme of things, just a blink.
I would love to read your list. Here goes:
My beautiful funny clever generous wife and our marriage in April
Our son who is due in March
Our amazing and supportive families and friends
The TV show A Victorian Kitchen Garden and how calming it is
Things you write to me
My yoga students
A degree of political sanity returning
The people who worked their butts off to make that happen
The people who wrote the checks that paid for it
Andy Warhol
Idris Elba
Hugh Laurie
My therapist Wayne
My stylist George
My agent Christopher
Lol the fact that I have a stylist and an agent and a therapist
I’m basically Elizabeth Taylor now
Weathering the storms
Interesting work and appreciative clients
My amazing consulting partners who I work with regularly
Being able to breathe in and out on a regular basis
My youth and my middle age
Moments as a teen when people said things that blew my mind
Yoga and meditation and the cool people who do it here in New York and elsewhere
The Manhattan Community Squash Center
Understanding what chakras mean and what they do
Learning Spanish, I’m sorry, aprendido español
Mi maestra de español, Maria Jose
Clothes
Novels
Nonfiction
Writing
Poetry
I mean ee cummings Sylvia Plath and the beats and Eliot
You could write a whole list about Eliot
Art
Theater
Romance
Gloom
Howard Hodgkin’s paintings
A roof over our heads and money to pay for it
Netflix, Amazon Prime, MUBI
The Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Washington Post
John Oliver
Concrete
The guy in our old building who survived AIDS in New York in the 80s and wrote a memoir about it
The New York Public Library
The Croydon Advertiser
Guillaume de Bailly (*He’s from The Bureau)
God’s existence, I hope
Sean Connery
Lunches in the street outside cafes that have reopened since Covid
Conversations over those lunches
My mental health
My physical health
Music
Golf
Philosophy
Jack Kerouac’s spoken word recordings and the way he giggles
Shakespeare
Croydon
Doctors
Insurance
Credit
The Stock Market
Good memories
The films that play in my head
Justice
Savasana
Peace
I hope you are taking care of yourself this thanksgiving and I wish you all the best.
Meantime, if you’d like to read an awesome newsletter about the sociology of food around Thanksgiving, which includes lots of feminist reflection on “the deception of wellness culture”, then I recommend this one. I’m certainly grateful for it.
Namaste.
Matt
