It feels distinctly weird to write a Thanksgiving post given that I am not actually in the USA right now. The last time that I felt this way was 4 years ago, when I was living in London, but the circumstances then were very different.
Back then, I was on a company assignment for 5 months and generally having a great time living basically rent-free in a VERY nice serviced apartment in Tower Hill while working on a pretty interesting tech-heavy gig and meeting a lot of very smart people. I returned back to the USA in the spring of 2015 with a much fatter bank account, a bright career ahead of me, and a lot of goodwill from my colleagues in London pushing me ahead.
Life as I understood it was very, very good back then.
This year was the year that everything went straight to hell for me.
As longtime readers – all 8 of them, however many of you are still around after nearly 6 years of blogging – know by now, I lost my job almost exactly 8 months ago. I ended up losing almost everything.
I had to leave a very comfortable and pleasant apartment that I had easily afforded for 3 years in a pretty nice city. I had to scramble to find new work in the USA – which was immediately made almost impossible by the God-Emperor’s America First policies that made H-1Bs all but a dead letter for even the largest companies. (By the way, I thoroughly support and agree with those policies.)
I did not succeed.
I then had to pack up all of my stuff by the end of May and leave the USA – which had been my home for nearly 12 years at that point.
I left because I had to, not because I wanted to. I love America, flawed and broken as it is today. I love the ideal of America, which was once and might just someday be again the greatest country on Earth – if only it could rediscover how to be a nation in the first place. I had spent all of my time in America trying to be a very good guest, and in the process I came to love both the country and its people.
America was, and remains a great country – because it was, and in many ways still is, good.
And I had no choice but to leave it, and pretty much everything within it that I held dear, behind.
I had to leave my sister, my cousin and his family, and my new family from my martial arts school. That last loss was the hardest to take, by far; I could always see my sister again and talk to her thanks to the miracles of modern telecommunications, but leaving behind my martial arts family nearly broke me.
This was, for all intents and purposes, my worst year ever.
I failed, repeatedly and catastrophically. I applied to so many jobs that I lost count – the number of total applications probably numbers well over a hundred, in the USA, the UK, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and even Russia.
Of those, maybe three companies were interested in giving me a shot at an interview. And not one of them was interested in taking things any further.
Even for a man used to rejection, that kind of failure rate was hard to take. And it was all too easy at certain points to simply give way to despair, because every single value that I had been taught, and almost every single thing that I believed, was shown to be utterly false.
In such poor soil, the seed of ingratitude easily takes root and bears bitter fruit.
And yet… I am still thankful, because I have much to be thankful for.
There is an old saying that “When one door closes, another one opens“. I have long believed that this is true, and that one should always try to look for the hidden opportunities to be found in adversity. And that was certainly true for me this year.
While I had certainly taken a tremendous kick in the teeth, I now had a level of freedom that I had not experienced in pretty much my entire life. I’m not joking about this, by the way; even when I was in university, I rarely took the opportunity to travel by myself to other countries because I was so focused on my studies and “doing the right thing”.
It took a seismic shift in perspective to make me realise that I had spent far too many of my more than 30 years on this Earth trying to live the life that my parents wanted for me – not the life that I actually wanted to live. They were looking out for me from the paradigm of their generation, and their virtues and morals were predicated on what they had been taught, in a system that worked for them.
But that system does not work for us today. I had been broken in large part because of an inability to reconcile what I had been taught, and what was actually true.
Although I had spent years building up my health, wealth, and knowledge, I had seriously neglected other critical areas of my life: personal relationships (not friendships but actual relationships), faith, spirituality, and new experiences.
I was given a golden opportunity to take some of my stored-up assets and use them to rectify these problems. And to a considerable extent, I succeeded.
It just so happened that I had obtained, for the purposes of work, a multiple-entry one-year visa to the Russian Federation. I lost my job just one day before I was due to collect my passport with my visa stamp in it. Even so, it seemed a cryin’ shame to let my visa go to waste, so I figured, why not use it?
So when I left the USA, my first destination was Russia – of all places. I had visited the country before, in October 2017, and had been completely bowled over by its beauty, architecture, history, language, food, and people. This time I went back at the height of its summer, and had an absolute blast. I visited Moscow again, and then took my first trip to St. Petersburg, and in both cases I met with real Russians (and real Russian girls – which was a whole new level of fun) who showed me just how hospitable and kind that the people of this incredible country really are.
After returning to the old country, and getting heartily sick of it after just a few days of enduring extreme heat and humidity, I took off again for a trip to Istanbul – which was, of course, an eye-opener for a great many reasons. This was once the greatest city in all of Christendom, and someday might just be again – if only Christendom would wake up and reclaim its lost heritage.
Then, a few weeks after returning, I decided to go visit a couple of other spots of interest in the old country, which I had not seen in many years. I had a pretty good time in both, even though I did not travel during the best possible season.
In late August, I traveled with my family to Singapore for a few days and was able to catch up with old friends and places that I had not seen in years.
And in mid-September, I traveled to Moscow again, this time for over a month, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
Throughout my travels, I came to realise very quickly that our Lord is still up there, still looking out for me. There is no doubt any longer in my mind about whether or not He works in this world, even as the Prince of Darkness owns it. There can be no question that God the Father is doing precisely what He said He would do, through Christ the Son and the True Faith.
And I have no doubt any longer that one day, all will bend the knee before Christ and proclaim that He is Lord and King.
And that is why I am thankful – because when one door slams shut, God finds a way to open another one, even if you have to learn some very harsh and painful lessons in the process.
The lesson from my life for the past year or so is that, no matter how bad things get, no matter how dark the pit is into which we have dug ourselves, there is always hope. The Russians have an old saying: Надежда умирает последней, or “hope dies last”, and that is true. There is always something to be grateful for, always something to appreciate.
Hope is a small thing – but it is remarkably hard to kill.
And that is the message that I bring to you all today. Do not lose hope. Do not flag in your faith. Our Father Above is looking out for you, just as He was for me, and still is. As bad as things are right now, as divided and bitter as the country is, and as totally inevitable as the next civil war in America is, there is still time to sit down at the dinner table tonight, hold hands with your family members – even the crazy full-SJW ones – and say a prayer of thanks to the Almighty.
While I am on the subject of gratitude – I owe you, the reader, thanks as well. My readership is small but, it would appear, intensely loyal. Many of my readers are veterans of the US Armed Forces, and for them I owe a special and profound debt of gratitude; it was their efforts and service that secured a country that let me come and live there as a guest, subject to American laws, and provided me with a safe and secure place to live. All that was ever asked of me in return was that I be a good guest, and I tried my best to be exactly that.
I write for no one but my self, and for no reason other than my own amusement. The day that I no longer feel that I have anything useful left to say, or any original thoughts left to contribute, you can be sure that I will walk away from this blog without a backward glance. But it is your continued patronage, your commentary, your emails, and your good wishes that keep me interested and engaged and constantly questioning and learning.
For these things, I am very grateful to you, the readers. And I hope that I continue to write posts that amuse, educate, and inspire you for years to come.
Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. Be hopeful and of good cheer, and enjoy your time with your family this day. And never, ever forget to be thankful to our Lord, the Creator and the one true God, who has given us all of this material abundance of which we now partake.
I leave off in a somewhat lighter vein, since this is a day that involves overindulgence and excess:
1 Comment
Did you apply for citizenship when you first Came to the US?