Conundrum: Something hard to understand or explain.
Hard to understand or explain? Try living dead center of one. Particularly during the "most wonderful time of the year" when family and supposed loved ones gather to celebrate.
Or, if you happen to be the artist among them, silently commiserate. With yourself. In virtual hiding.
One of the best Thanksgiving articles I've ever read was a New York Times piece tagged with the hilarious title "The Annual Gathering of Tension." And family gatherings will always guarantee tension, that's for sure. That unmistakable feeling of unspoken words hanging in mid-air whenever you enter (or leave) a roomful of relatives. Accompanied by the thought is it me, am I being paranoid, or is my sixth sense picking up on the reality of the situation?
Then again, that "desire to hide" is pumping up your sweat glands, firing neurons in your brain, and activating the fight or flight response, so it's probably a combination of all of the above. The desire to communicate accompanied by the desperate desire to just get the hell out of an uncomfortable situation and find the nearest rock to dive under and stay there until the coast is clear.
When you're still of a tender age, you can handle the stress of communicating, if only to have a sense of belonging. As the years pile up, though, safety and peace of mind take precedence and you no longer care about "belonging"...you just want to get through the day sans sweating, and the excruciating exhaustion of small talk when all you want, to quote Simon & Garfunkel, is "the sound of silence."
"Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again. Because a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping. And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence..."
Which leads us back to "something hard to understand or explain."
Yeah, that about covers it. And then some.
So, this Thanksgiving, I give thanks to D.W. Winnicott for allowing something hard to understand or explain to be understood. And explained.
Peaceful Thanksgiving!
