I love Thanksgiving.  It is probably my favorite holiday.   I love it because it is simple and straightforward.  It is a day filled with the most basic elements of living: family, food, and friendship. These are the things that most of us are truly thankful for anyway.   In our family it is a day of familiar dishes and familiar roles. We bring special things from both sides of the family, including the deserts that are favorites from childhood.  It makes me feel good to again taste my mother’s recipe for stuffing, to whip potatoes and make gravy. On this day I relish eating what I try to avoid during the rest of the year, and I enjoy every bite.   There are new things as well.  This year my daughter found another way to arrange the table to comfortably seat everyone, and the napkins had a spiffy new fold.  New dishes appeared that turned out to be a big hit.  I bet they will be around next year!  You can almost see the children building traditions for their future.

We have three generations at the table, the better part of a century of experience. There’s a lot of banter and fun, mixed with little snapshots of our lives.   If you look carefully you can see expectation in the young, responsibility borne in the middle years, and the memories of the elders.  There are no babies anymore. The youngest member of the family is the new bulldog puppy snoring contentedly under the table. It is his first Thanksgiving, and he made it through the day with only minor mishaps.  Children continue growing like weeds.  Voices deepen, inches are added, and we all look a bit older.  Some are coming home from college for the first time, telling stories of their forays into the world.

Yes, I do love Thanksgiving.  For me it is a testament to the simplicity of our journey.  What is more basic than family, food, and fun?  We are in the same place, and yet we are all in different places. Thanksgiving is an exquisite reminder that life is the both the same and always changing.  That is what makes it so special.  No wonder I love it so.  It is nice to have the opportunity just to feel grateful.

Behind every act of compassion you will find a hero, sometimes more than one.  These heroes perform acts of compassion almost anytime and anywhere.  These are ordinary people like you and me.  I call them “pocket heroes” because their everyday acts of compassion never make headlines and often are not even noticed.   We have to look for them, and they are very real.   It could be said that these moments of compassion are an unspoken testament to our potential for goodness.

Not long ago I attended a concert presented by our local symphony.  It was held in the auditorium of the town hall.  The place was crowded, the orchestra tuning up, and the last minute push to get to seats was on.  I was sitting in the balcony—which is up quite high.  The building has great acoustics, but the steps are very steep in the balcony.  I thought that most everyone was seated when I noticed a cluster of people still making their way in.  An elderly woman, moving unsteadily with her cane was leading the group.  An usher pointed to their seats in the middle of a row halfway down.  The woman and her friend came to the top of the stairs.  She looked out into the yawning space and stopped.  She just froze.  She stood there and didn’t say a word.  Her friend moved in front of her and tried to coax her to take a step down.  She still didn’t move.

Gradually the pre-concert buzz in our area quieted.  Heads turned, and people began to watch the little drama unfold.  The woman seemed to be aware of the attention and she lowered her eyes.  It seemed clear that she wanted to move, but couldn’t.  She stood there in apparent defeat.    The crowd stopped watching and began to help.  Those in her designated row moved over until the two end seats were vacant.  She was still frozen.  People began to move again.  Two in the seats right beside her stood up.  Someone further down motioned to them and pointed to the empty seats.  A man patted her shoulder and started down the stairs.  A problem was solved, and a collective sigh of relief ensued that could be felt more than heard.  The preconcert buzz returned, and the moment was gone. 

The conductor came onstage and the evening was underway.  I sat there transfixed.  What had just happened?   A group of people, unknown to each other, had coalesced from individual droplets into a larger whole.  For a moment they had become a  larger drop of compassion.  When the need passed everyone returned to their original state.  As I listened to the concert I kept wondering which was more beautiful, the music or the people?  That’s what pocket heroism does to you.

How often do you think of the importance of your life as part of the collective human journey? If you are like me, the notion may slip into consciousness occasionally, but not very often.  I am much more likely to think of my life in relation to family and friends.  I know there that who I am and what I do makes a difference.  These are the people that I interact with on a regular basis, and I can see what happens. Most of the time I just go about the business of living without thinking much about it.  I get caught up in daily events.  I follow my habitual patterns, my coffee in the morning and all those little things throughout the day that I love so much.  I stay in the moment as best I can, but can also be pretty fluid in moving to the past or the future, depending on what is going both inside and outside.  I get caught up roles, often good roles that are important to me.  I have work that I love, friends that are important, and family that means more to me than words can describe.  But to be part of the larger journey of the race, that just doesn’t cross my mind very often.

However, there are times when I do stop to consider that my life is part of a larger journey of learning. I find that the larger framework most often comes to mind when I consider myself a contributor to global warming, or over-consumption, or when I am part of a big event such as a national election. Usually these are the times that I get a glimpse of what it means to be a member of the collective.  When I do dig a little deeper I ask myself what I might have to contribute to that larger journey?  Oddly enough this question casts my own personal journey in a different light.  It somehow makes it more important.  I also need to be reminded of the fact that we are always learning in life.   What if the way I live my personal life actually contributes to a larger network of consciousness that influences all human journeys?  Then, what I learn and what I do and think is part of a much greater learning process. Consider for a moment that we live during a time of great medical and technological advances.  Think what this might mean for our future.  We are living longer, and the notion of aging is shifting.  That affects me.  It affects us all.   I am reminded that we must learn to utilize an extended life span, and that will influence how we understand the life cycle in the future.  I am reminded that from beginning to the end our individual lives have a unique contribution to make in shaping the journey of the entire race.  We take this journey both individually and collectively, and this could be considered an invitation to value life in a broader way, for the way we live our lives now is the gift that we give to the future.  So, value your life not only for what it means to you personally, but also for what it might mean for all of us collectively. 

Elections show how much we need a hero.  They show how deep our hunger is for the heroic personality, the men and women who personify values that are enduring, altruistic, patriotic, and often sacrificial.  In times of change we look to leaders that represent these values to help us find our way forward. There develops an enormous enthusiasm that is infectious and inspirational. We are hopeful and deeply invested in how our heroes can shape the future.  This might even disguise a desire to have these leaders save us from our fear of the unknown.  In any case, our focus on outward leadership can tempt us to forget something that is very important.  We are all heroes in our own lives.  We participate in small heroic acts every day.  We are “pocket” heroes, participating in moments that never make headlines, but bring daily comfort and hope to others within our communal fabric.  I call this “pocket” heroism, because it is almost invisible and yet it happens all the time.  It brightens our day and it keeps us together.

Recently I took the subway to meet some friends for a late lunch.  It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and the weather was warm and sunny.  Everyone seemed to be out enjoying the day, and those of us getting off the subway were eager to get upstairs into the sunlight.  The crowd hurried up the stairs, and I rounded the bend with the onslaught, almost bumping into an elderly woman struggling to haul a heavy suitcase up the steep steps.  A younger woman, probably her daughter, was just ahead of her with an even larger suitcase.  Without thinking about it I stopped and asked if I could help.  She pulled herself up to her full height and said: “No thanks.  I brought all this stuff, and I can get it to the top.”  She smiled and thanked me for asking, and I continued on my way.  When I got to the top I instinctively turned around.  Behind me every face had a smile on it.  A young man who was just behind me had heard our exchange.  He didn’t ask permission.  He just took matters into his own hands and grabbed the other end of her suitcase.  Together they were carrying it up the stairs, both of them laughing at the situation.  The crowd was clearly enjoying every moment of it.  What was special for me was that he waved when he saw me turn around, an indication that in some way we were all involved together.  It truly made my day!!

Yes, we are all heroes in our own lives.  We interact with each other everyday in small heroic ways.  We don’t change the world, but we make it a better place as we touch each other’s lives.  We take risks, and we make small sacrifices.  We learn and we grow together through these experiences and discover that every small act of compassion has a hero behind it.  These acts inspire us.  They bring us out of our self-absorption, and just for a moment we act on behalf of another.  In doing this we open to the experience of a deeper connection with all.  So, will the real hero stand up? That person is you and it is me!!!  

The party is over. The guests have gone home full of visions of how the future might change. Expectations are very, very high. We are all in danger of holding magical beliefs about instant transformation. We want change, and we want it to happen soon. We are also in danger of forgetting how the process of change really works, for change is like life. It is a bit messy. We learn and we change by trial and error, and that takes time. We make mistakes, and then have to correct them. We lose our way, and find it again. Slowly we find the better way, the one that might work. Always, it is a process of becoming and unfolding.

But how is change corrupted? It happens because the idea behind the change must itself go through a process, and sometimes it loses the purity it carried in the beginning. Do you remember the telephone game that we played as children? It went like this. We all sat in a circle, and one person whispered a phrase into the ear of the next person. In this way the phrase was passed around the circle until the last person repeated what they heard. Usually the idea evolved in some very interesting ways. Often it became an entirely different phrase, and gave us all a good laugh when compared to the original. So what changed the original idea? We did, for we were involved in hearing, processing, and passing it on. Each time this happened there was an opportunity to corrupt the original phrase.

Change evolves in real time, and original ideas are likely to be corrupted by the events of everyday life. Daily experiences intrude and influence most everything. An idea is malleable and moves as it ages, and it is easy for us to get tired and lose sight of the goal. There can be a problem with the length of the chain that any change must follow in order to become a reality. Many are party to how hope and dearly held promises are altered as they encounter problems in the movement from idea to concrete reality. In the end, we each choose to be patient with the process or frustrated and disappointed by it. We are in a position to support those who are agents of change by helping them to continually refine their own process. We can remind them to regularly clean their antennae in order that they may truly hear others hopes for the future. We can remain faithful to these hopes, and attach as little of our own personal agenda to them as is humanly possible. In these small ways we can halt the corrosive corruption of change.