Sometimes All We Need Is An Excuse.

On Giving Thanks

I meant to send you guys a different edition today—I wrote it, edited it, had it ready to schedule. But then I decided against it. I decided, instead, to do what I’m sure many other newsletters you subscribe to are doing: write about Thanksgiving.

(I know today is not Thanksgiving, but I wrote this yesterday and didn’t want to interrupt your family/friends time with a newsletter so…)

I am not American, nor feel like I am. I am just a guy from the opposite side of the world who can call himself lucky, too lucky, for what he was able to learn in the years he spent living in New York. There were too many lessons to count, in fact, but…

One of those lessons is that sometimes, excuses are a wonderful thing. It can even be a poor excuse, a weak excuse. For example: One day a year, Americans close their eyes and pretend they care about some silly harvest festival, or about eating turkey and cranberry sauce and maybe even candied sweet potatoes, when hidden behind this charade is the most wondrous of rituals: an opportunity to pause, and join in with loved ones, and give thanks. How incredible is that?

If you’ve followed my work, you know that I care deeply about it. I love to write. I think about writing constantly when awake and go to bed with stories and phrases and even whole paragraphs circling ‘round the void as I close my eyes.

Writing fills me—it enlivens me. It is something I’ve done virtually every day of my life since I was 13-years-old and still, day after day, continues to amaze me, enchant me, as if I were just discovering it for the first time.

But sometimes we need an excuse. Sometimes, we need to listen to our American friends and see the wisdom behind their seemingly-silly actions.

Sometimes we need to leave our work be, leave it aside, even if we don’t have a good enough reason why. Maybe then we’ll get to stop, and breathe, and look at the world, at the faces and things you love, and let that small thought, that tiny thought that is always there but you never seem to listen to, the one that says in a voice that reminds you of your childhood self:

Look. Look! Look! How amazing is this? Look at the trees, the sky, your skin. How lucky are we? We get to be here, here, in this world, when we could just as easily not be here, or anywhere else at all.

As I said, I am not American, nor feel like I am. I should not celebrate Thanksgiving, nor I will, in the traditional sense at least. But I will heed their advice, steal their excuse—I will leave my work aside, just for today, just for right now, and give thanks.

To my parents, for being insane enough to believe me and support me when I said I wanted to be a writer.

To my brother, who has been there in too many ways to count, and whose awesomeness and wisdom and example is the reason why this newsletter exists (or why I started writing in the first place, even).

To all my Argentinean friends, for being… well, everything to me.

To all my American friends (you know who you are)—for inviting me to your homes and sharing your table with me, both on Thanksgiving, and on all other days.

I am thankful for the fact that I am as lucky as any human being can possibly be—in more ways than you might expect, or hope to expect.

I am thankful for the fact that I get to do what I love, and do it (somewhat) well, and get paid for it.

And I am thankful for you—yes, you. I may know you in person, or we might have just chatted a couple of times via Slack or Twitter. Still, I am thankful for you. You are part of a tiny group nice (or crazy) enough to read what I write, and care, and if having someone like you in my life isn’t a wonderful thing I don’t know what is.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. See you next week.