Thanksgiving

Walking the Line

Hello Friends,

Happy Thanksgiving! I mean it—no irony here. Enjoy your day.

I hope none of you are actually reading this on Thursday. Rather, I wish that you all are having such an enjoyable day that you forget you even own a computer or cellphone.

For me, holidays have always been a love / hate type of affair—a mixture of precarious celebration, impossible expectations, and anticipated disappointment: In other words, family time.

In my experience, there always seems to be such a fine line between joyous hilarity and hysterical tears. A knife’s edge. A tipping point where one caustic comment can produce a flip or landslide, and the whole holiday becomes one of those years.

And because of this tension, at least until I started controlling my own events, holidays had this dangerous quality, the potential for verbal barbs and knife fights.

For me, these festivities are fraught with emotional landmines. For others, it’s politics or recent events.

People who study the phenomenon of conditions being in this precarious state call it the critical zone or edge of chaos.

It exists in various contexts. Forest fires have this type of posture where they can peter out or explode into a tragedy. Animal populations, too. Also, infectious diseases.

People use this critical theory to contemplate the operation of the brain.

Criticality offers a powerful framework for understanding brain function and dysfunction.

Karim Jerbi, quoted in New Scientist, 6 Sept 2025

Our neurons are connected in intricate networks of synaptic connections, and when any cell “fires”, it can trigger other cells to fire in response. “Activity builds on itself much like an avalanche,” says Jordan O’Brien, Jerbi’s PhD student at the University of Montreal.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2493651-the-crucial-role-of-chaos-in-our-brains-most-extraordinary-functions/

When things are stabilized on this boundary dividing order and disarray, our brains and holidays are healthy. There is calmness and just enough frenetic activity to keep life interesting and joyous.

But one small action can send the whole thing crashing down into turmoil.

That description feels right to me.

I’ve often noticed that time can be going along just swimmingly, and then one more drop in the bucket (love my metaphors): some guy cuts you off, a telemarketer makes you worry that your identity has been stolen, a product you count on for your diet plan is absent from the shelf it’s always been, and off you go: pandemonium for the rest of the day.

As a result, your brain function has entered the territory where it is impossible for you to be your best self.

When this happens to me, if I have the space, I tend to try to isolate myself in an effort to slide the scale back into order.

I take a few moments of solitude after the kitchen has been cleaned up and everyone else has gone to bed. A turkey sandwich and a glass of rye on the rocks next to a subdued fire seem to do the trick.

Delivers just what I need to once again find the joyful peace I experience when, the next day, I make breakfast for a household of sleeping people.

I think it’s important to know of the existence of this tension.

Your brain (and your holiday) includes both order and disorder, and, if we are lucky, we live in harmony. Remember, a push into chaos is temporary and not final (at least until the next holiday).

Perhaps this thought helps dull the razor’s edge, so it’s just a little wider, and it takes 2 not 1 drunken comment to fall off.

Happy reading, happy writing, happy tightrope walking,

David