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Scheduling: No Triad on Thursday or Friday. The Next Level is out now, here. The Secret show will come out Friday.
1. Showing Up
When you’re a kid, social obligations don’t make sense.
Your parents say you have to go to some distant second-cousin’s funeral and all you can think is how boring it’ll be and how your life has never really intersected with these people in meaningful ways.
Then you get older and realize that it’s not about you. You understand how much it means just to show up for others.
That’s what Thanksgiving has always been to me. It’s a holiday about showing up. A holiday built around the corporal acts of mercy. A holiday about being present.
You guys show up for me here pretty much every day. I can’t possibly express how much it means to me knowing that you read this newsletter. To know that if I ask your thoughts about something, hundreds of you will share them. To know that if I put out the call for someone who needs support, thousands of you will stop what you’re doing and give to them.
Writing this newsletter is a grant of enormous privilege. It has been the biggest honor of my career. I am thankful to all of you for trusting me with your time and thoughtfulness.
Other things I’m thankful for include the friendships I’ve made with so many of you. And that you guys have made it possible for us to give free memberships to anyone who wants to be part of the community but can’t swing it.
I’ve always felt a little strange having a gate here, because if you only include people who can pay, then you don’t have a community. You have a club. And I do not like clubs. But one of the things I’m proudest of—and most grateful for—is the way you’ve all pitched in so that everyone who wants to be part of this thing of ours, can be.¹ No matter what. Thank you for this; it means everything to me.
2. Thankful
I’m going to talk slightly elliptically here, because I always try to balance being completely real with you against being overly personal. So please don’t take this as me being coy.
Charles Krauthammer once talked about how there is a fundamental divide in the world between sickness and health. There is the land of health, in which people have normal concerns and there is the land of sickness, in which everything is filtered through the lens of the fight to get back to health. In the land of sickness, worldly concerns become secondary while quotidian events take on extraordinary meaning.
In the land of sickness it is hard to care about, say, politics. But the question of what to cook for Thanksgiving dinner becomes enormous, because you understand that time is finite.
My family has been going through some stuff for the last month. The kind of medical and health stuff that every family goes through eventually. There’s nothing special or dramatic; it’s part of life.
Until a few days ago, the situation was fairly grim. Last Friday we got some unexpected good news and now have some very real hope. This unexpected hope, dropped into our lives just a few days before Thanksgiving, has felt like a real-deal, New Testament miracle.
I relay all this not to freak anyone out, but just by way of sharing the biggest thing I am thankful for today.
I don’t plan on talking about this again and I’d appreciate you not discussing it in the comments. But it’s what has been on my mind and my heart more than anything else and whatever my faults as a correspondent, I will always be open with you.
Happy Thanksgiving, fam. May your day be filled with love and hope.