My plate was as full as my heart yet again this Thanksgiving. The difference was, my plate did not remain full. It emptied out. True, it filled up again, but that problem was rectified soon enough.
In my 50s, I’ve discovered this shovel-as-flatware approach to dining brings a different sort of fullness. And this one is not quite so satisfying. And it lingers longer, too.
On March 20, 1925, an Anglican priest named Frederick Lewis Donaldson preached a sermon centering around what he called the “7 Deadly Social Evils.” Through the help of what he called a “fair friend,” Mohandas Gandhi had the opportunity to reprint the list in his weekly newspaper. A few weeks before the Mahatma’s assassination, he gave a handwritten copy of the list to his grandson, Arun Gandhi. It was Arun Gandhi that brought the list to the world, publishing it after his grandfather’s death under the heading “Seven Blunders of the World.”
The tagline was, “25 Dumb Things People Think are Cool.” I was drawn in. The caption led me to believe it would be a list of things that are inherently dangerous, or that are based on pseudo-science. Turns out, as a couple of clicks revealed, it was basically a list of things that many people in our culture like but the one making the list does not like. I really need to spend less time online.
