An Expat Canadian Thanksgiving
I am totally not fact checking this because ‘Canada’ tweeted it. That’s right, all 35 million Canadians share a Twitter account and get along. We also have less gravity than the rest of the planet. Most of the time we cling to trees. So we win at a few things.
Speaking of fact checking, you might have noticed that I have never posted anything myself about American politics over the last year. Not even the debate fact checking videos (which I love, Robot Tosca will have this feature built-in). Indeed, the ultra-liberal, pro-LGBTQ, pro-choice, Atheist has managed to keep my big mouth shut throughout it all. Why am I giving myself a pat on the back? Simple. It’s Canadian Thanksgiving and I miss it every year, so I am telling you what I am grateful for.
I am grateful to have lived so long outside of Canada that it is no longer ‘home’. I am grateful that I have friends from every ethnicity, religion, political framework and corner of the world. They have taught me to hold a mirror up to myself in order to look at my own culture and see the things we could do better. They have taught me that “right” is relative.
I am grateful that as a child I had free education, access to health care, and water I could drink out of the tap. I am grateful that although I grew up hearing the bomb sirens tested on summer afternoons, I never had to live with bombs actually dropping on my small town. I am grateful that I had the freedom to play and explore my world as a child, and that is true for my present too. I am grateful for the people around me who are kind, generous and good- they help navigate those who are petty, cruel and judgmental.
I am grateful that I no longer have a family bound only by blood and genes, but a global tribe that exists in not only the physical world but also ‘the cybers’. Mostly, I am grateful that I have someone who loves me for my stupid jokes about clinging to trees and becoming a robot.
As we move forward in the coming difficult days, I hope we are able to give thanks together. Lately, I have seen many calls for prayer to deal with the hardships we face in our world, including the political climate. For me, when times get tough, I no longer pray but ruminate on Carl Sagan’s words about our shared planet,
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light…”
These two are nothing but a moment in the cosmic time frame. A dot. I hope we can live that moment with as much empathy and kindness as possible. On both sides. And if we can’t, I hope we learn from it and move forward in time and space. Getting better, and giving thanks along the way.
