Happy Thanksgiving! Coincidentally (or not), I’ve been thinking about gratitude a bit lately. I stumbled across Berkeley’s Greater Good site recently, and spent some time perusing the gratitude section. The site, at first glance, seems a bit new-agey (or maybe hippy–dippy?), but it appears to be science-based, and might be worth a deeper look.
And I recently listened to an episode of Note to Self featuring Chade-Meng Tan, a former Google employee who has written a couple of books on happiness and mindfulness. I keep telling myself that I need to read up on some of this stuff, and maybe give meditation a try, but I never get around to doing it. (Then, I feel guilty about that, and that’s certainly counter-productive…) Maybe approaching the subject from an engineer’s point of view would make it easier for me to get into? I guess I’ll add his books to the big (virtual) pile of stuff I’d like to read (but probably won’t get around to).
Looking at Facebook this morning, I saw a number of Thanksgiving morning posts, and was struck by how eloquently and genuinely some of my friends expressed their gratitude for family and friends today. I have trouble doing that without working in a degree of sarcasm. The phrase that comes to mind (for some reason) is “sand in the vaseline” which is the title of a Talking Heads best-of compilation (and has nothing to do with anything, really, but that’s how my mind works sometimes).
Regardless of all that, I’m going to be hitting the road soon, driving down to a friend’s house, and we’ll hopefully have a nice little Thanksgiving. I made a sweet potato pie last night, and bought a bottle of Gewürztraminer, so that’s a good start.