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For those of us here in The States, this past Thursday was Thanksgiving. Although it's always been one of my favorite holidays, like everything else in America, it lately seems to have become supersized, and has been transformed into little more than a homage to gluttony. To put it mildly, turkeys aren't the only things getting stuffed on the last Thursday in November.

To advertisers and marketers, Thanksgiving has become the starting whistle to the holiday shopping frenzy, which starts the very day after with "Black Friday", an event that has created a new holiday tradition: breathless news reports of crazed consumers lining up before dawn, trampling over each other's overstuffed backsides in a frenzied scramble to get their pudgy mitts on discounted 50 inch flat screen TVs.

There was an interesting piece that ran in the New York Times earlier this week, which pointed out that through much of this nation's early history, the Thanksgiving feast was preceded by a Thanksgiving fast. People would deprive themselves for a day or two, and follow-up that deprivation with a huge feast. The Taoist in me loves that notion, it seems to me to be in keeping with the Yin and Yang of things. There can be no day without night, no peaks without valleys, no happy without sad. Why not no feast without fast? As a society, but also as individuals, we seem to have lost sight of the double-edged nature of reality. We are all for the "gain", but want nothing much to do with the "pain". It's all about the easy fix, but for those of us dealing with chronic illness, there is no such thing.