Lessons in Gratitude

This is one of those weekend days that I have from time to time, more often than not actually. It was a quiet, low key kind of day. It’s not like I had a long to-do list or a full slate of planned activities, so in that sense I didn’t have high expectations of what I would get done today. In fact, other than preparing lunch, dinner and dinner for tomorrow for Michal and me, I couldn’t really say what I accomplished today. I have to continually remind myself that life is not solely about accomplishment, about getting things done. It seems at times like I am surrounded by doers doing. We spend so much time doing we miss out on being.

As I write this evening, I can hear my daughter in her room playing her guitar and singing. Yes, singing. Her throat is vastly improved, the antibiotics having kicked in sometime yesterday afternoon such that by this morning she was at “80%” toward feeling better. This is a tremendous relief. She had been so miserable, she said she felt like she was swallowing shards of glass her throat hurt so much. She has been able to eat solid food again today and her disposition is much improved and her spirits are high. So there she is in her room playing and singing. And without intending to she is sending me a message, a reminder about being, about flowing, about the power that comes from doing something you love.

I am so grateful for the gift of music. Even in the midst of all the doing, I’m finding time to sing more, though I haven’t had my guitar out of its case for a few weeks. In the midst of working and commuting, of anxieties and pressures, of national tragedies and personal cares, the power of music to quiet, soothe, heal is a palpable thing and a voice raised in song is very nearly, if not actually, a prayer. Music is a gift I’ve shared with my children from their childhood. The three of us used to get on our various instruments–Jared on drums, me on guitar and Michal on vocals–singing three part harmonies on Sesame Street songs. It makes me happy that each of them has gone on to sharpen their musical talents far beyond my own abilities. They each in their own rights are excellent musicians and singer-songwriters, just like me. It puts a smile on my face just to think about that.

These days I have a lot on my mind–responsibilities and obligations I need to meet, things I want to accomplish over the course of the next several weeks and months, personal projects I want to undertake. I do not know at this moment how I will go about doing the various things that I should do and those I must do; but I know that there are things that my soul needs, without which all the doing in the world won’t make any difference. So I want to practice being even as my daughter reminded me tonight. I want to be present for and notice each moment as best I can without focus or worry about what’s going to happen in the next moment or the next day or the next year. So tonight as I take my rest I will bathe my mind in peaceful, grateful, loving thoughts and wake to face the new day with my fresh set of mercies and grace. May it be so.

On days like today, there are no words that can be written or spoken that helps us makes sense of the senseless. Today’s shooting in Newtown, Connecticut defies explanation. How can one explain the murder of innocent children? The other night I wrote about how grateful I was that my children survived the many illnesses and injuries of childhood and have entered into their young adulthood. It is mind boggling to think about living in a place where children also have to survive mass shootings at their elementary schools, places where we once considered them safe. Of course in some communities in this country children go to school in neighborhoods that are like war zones. We don’t hear much about these children who sadly are accustomed to being unsafe. There are no news reports from those schools or those communities.

It creates some internal dissonance for me to feel grateful to have been able to raise my kids in communities where they were safe and where violence in their schools was as distant and unlikely a possibility as it had been for those in the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Like many parents across the country tonight I expressed love and gratitude for my children. My sister’s children are the youngest in our family at 12 and 14, though my oldest sister has a grandson who is in kindergarten this year. I am thankful for each of them, for their safety and wellbeing, and for my kids’ half brother who is about to turn five. I found myself hugging my 22 year old daughter, who I know was thinking about her little brother and imagining children that young being victims of such an awful crime.

No, I won’t write much tonight except to add my prayers to the millions of others praying for the families of the children and adults who were killed as well as those who survived but are suffering emotional and mental distress. May they find healing and comfort. May they be surrounded by and embraced by other family, friends, and loved ones. May all who have lost children to the violence of this world be comforted and surrounded by loved ones. May they be buoyed by the prayers and love of people known and unknown to them. May it be so for all who have suffered loss this day.

Over a year ago I decided that it would be a good idea to write a morning journal and a gratitude blog every day. My journal writing typically occurs first thing in the morning before I’ve had my coffee and my blog is generally written just before I retire in the evening. There are some days when I am tempted to rethink this plan. Tonight is one of them. Last night I returned home at 12:45 a.m. after taking my sick “child” to the after hours medical clinic, finally going to bed at around 1:30, and rose this morning at 6 a.m. after having hit the snooze on the alarm every seven minutes between 5:33 and 5:53. I slogged through my day of meetings, undertook my daily commute, which this evening took one hour and 37 minutes, finally arriving home at 7 o’clock. Mama said there’ll be days like this, and I sure am tired. Nevertheless there are many things for which I am grateful and will, as usual, share a few thoughts on them.

I have become a big believer in gratitude. Writing this blog certainly is a testament to that after 500 plus days. I’m also a big fan of gratitude’s close cousin–appreciation– and I find distressing how few people really focus on expressing thanks to and appreciation for their fellow human beings. I have lately been the beneficiary of a number of expressions of appreciation from various people in my life. It is such a good feeling to be thanked for a contribution you made or a talent you have or simply for your presence. It is likewise a good thing to offer appreciations to others, recognizing their value, their presence, the roles they play in various settings. I read somewhere that gratitude begets gratitude, that the more we’re grateful for the blessings in our lives the more we see, we have, we gain to be grateful for. Similarly, the more we appreciate the people around us and express that appreciation, the more we discover what is “appreciateable” in that person. (Okay, so appreciateable is not a word, but you get the idea.)

This is not, of course, why we offer gratitude and appreciation–that we’ll get something for ourselves out of it; it is a positive side effect. But the principle holds true nonetheless. It takes so little effort to express thanks or appreciation and yet I see so many people who don’t bother, who pass up the opportunity to say thank you. For simple kindnesses like holding open a door for someone or letting someone pull in front of you in traffic more often than not go unappreciated, or if they are appreciated, the person on the receiving end of the kindness doesn’t bother with an outward gesture indicating their thanks. I try not to let it bother me, but it does. How hard is it to say thank you or to wave one’s thanks?

I am tired this evening, so perhaps I am not articulating this as well as I’d like. I simply want to invite each of us in to a space of gratitude and appreciation. I am grateful for the simple acts of kindness that people extend to me on a regular basis and I am likewise grateful for the opportunities I have to “pay it forward” and offer kindness and appreciations to others. I look forward to days when we can appreciate one another every day many times per day. What a difference that would make in the world. Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing what I can in my own small ways to bring gratitude and appreciation with me wherever I go.

My daughter came home for the holidays and promptly got sick. We have an 11 p.m. appointment at a local after hours clinic about 15 minutes from my house. It kind of makes me tired just contemplating it, but there’s nothing for it. She’s been sick for the last two days and nothing is making her sore throat better. And while I’d like to take her in the morning, I have a number of things I should not miss at work. Suddenly I find myself transported back in time through the many times during her infancy and childhood when I had to go to doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, and various appointments with medical and dental professionals over the years.  I am grateful to have had access to good medical care for both of my kids as they were growing up and the means via good health insurance and full time employment income to be able to afford it.

Given all the things that can happen and do, it’s a wonder that any of us make it out of childhood. I have spent countless hours with medical professionals my kids for a wide variety of “normal” childhood ailments like bad colds and ear infections to grown up issues like mononucleosis (which hit my daughter during the first semester of her first year in college) through my son’s collapsed lung and subsequent surgery to repair it a couple of years ago. Compared to what some parents have endured with their children, who are far more seriously ill than mine have been I feel fortunate. I realize once again that no matter how old they get, they are still my children and I feel the same sense of helplessness when they are sick now as I did when they were much younger. Only now they’re a bit better at being able to explain their symptoms and situations to the doctor and I no longer need to go in with them while they are examined. I do know that no matter how old they might be now, when they are sick they can be as small and vulnerable as when they were children, still looking to me to somehow make it better for them. And so I do what I can.

Going to the doctor at 11 p.m. tonight will make for a long day at work tomorrow. There’s no wiggle room in my schedule so I need to be there in the morning and will have to drink fully caffeinated coffee to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I will be glad to be able to get my daughter some relief from her excruciatingly sore throat and other symptoms so she can rest and be headed toward recovery in time to be able to relax and enjoy her holiday. As for me, I’ll take my rest tomorrow evening when I get home from work and be grateful that she’ll be on the mend. For me that is more than good enough.

Sometimes a simple change in perspective makes a big difference in how I approach something, which in turn can often affect the outcome. I have watched my attitude toward certain events on my calendar. Some of the meetings and events that seem to be dominating my calendar these days at times have felt quite onerous. At one point last week I found myself thinking of a particular event as “that dumb event.” In the scheme of things I suppose I could have referred to it in a much more negative way than simply “dumb,” but the point is that I held a dim view of what was required of me in attending this dumb event. Finally I caught hold of myself, realizing what I was doing, how I was bathing that event in constant negativity. I realized that in so doing I was predisposing myself to experience it in a very unhelpful borderline damaging way.

Get a grip, I finally told myself and ceased referring to it aloud or in my head as “that dumb event.” I won’t give myself enough benefit of the doubt to say that I began referring to it as “that wonderful event,” but at least I stopped thinking negatively about it. By the time I actually attended the function, I found it enjoyable and acknowledge that it sparked a number of new ideas in my head about how to move a particular project forward. Had I remained in my negative, irritated mindset, it is possible, in fact quite likely that I would have experienced the event negatively and sat through it, barely enduring it and deriving no benefit for having spent the time there.

Increasingly I am aware that it often takes an act of will to turn away from an unhelpful mindset, a negative approach to an event, a person, a situation. I look at how I am viewing a person from a particular perspective and realize that I am influenced by the attitudes of people around me. While their opinions might help to inform how I approach a particular person, I nonetheless must use my own judgment and instincts in dealing with him/her. It is easy to get drawn into negativity; often we are surrounded by it. In a toxic environment we can find ourselves pulled into unhelpful feelings toward a person or an organization and before I realize it I am listening to and agreeing with the disparaging opinion that’s being expressed.

Being positive is in many ways, swimming against the current in many situations. It has required a lot of work to find positivity even in the midst of struggle and drama. But it has definitely been worth the effort. I am grateful for the lesson, for the internal compulsion that I find and focus on what’s good, what’s positive, what works rather than the alternative. On days like today when I decide not to focus on the “dumb event,” but approach it from a neutral to a slightly positive perspective I find value where there previously appeared to be none. I try to approach the world from this particular filter as best I can. So far I am only moderately successful and still fall down a lot, tripping and falling into my own skewed perspective. Still, I stick with it, doggedly determined to get better, to not only not fall victim to negativity, but to infuse my life and my environment with positivity when and where I can.

Gratitude continues to be an essential element in my efforts at self improvement. When I look around me and see blessings everywhere I cannot help but move toward greater positivity in my life. I hope I can get more people to join me in this effort. If we each really began to consciously focus on the things for which we’re grateful, think of what kind of world we’d be living in. I for one am interested in living in that world.

Another long week has come to an end. I am grateful at this moment for the quiet I am experiencing in this moment. It passed, and I enjoyed it while it lasted. The quiet, I mean. I watched a program on television a number of years ago that said that there is virtually no place on earth that is truly quiet, that even out in the wilderness the sounds of nature can in some places be just as loud as a noisy city street. I wonder sometimes as I look at the faces of the people around me if they are longing for quiet as much as I do at times. I think I am talking about companionable silence versus solitude. Solitude I have, quiet is a little more elusive.

I am grateful tonight for all the lessons that gratitude is teaching me, or rather what I am learning from concentrating attention each day on the blessings that are present in my life. Though I still have much to learn about what it means to truly live a life of gratitude, to truly walk my path with a grateful, open heart, I feel like I have come a long distance in a short time. The span of my short life–these 55 years–are not even a blip on the cosmic radar screen; my presence on the timeline of the planet is tiny. And yet each beat of my heart reminds me that I matter.

It has indeed been a long and tiri g week. I haven’t slept long enough for the past several weeks, so I need to attend to my physical wellbeing a little better than I have. And I have to continue to remind myself to breathe deeply and often. I find myself exhaling a lot because I realize I have been holding my breath. So I plan to exhale a lot this weekend and refresh myself in the days ahead. And as much as I’d like to sleep in tomorrow, I have things on my at home to-do list that mean I’ll sleep a little later than 6 a.m. but not much later. I am grateful for another day, another week, no matter how tiring. It’s all good.

I’m going to close early tonight; I’ve fallen asleep a number of times as I’ve been typing–always a signal to me to put the lid down on the laptop and go to sleep. I will be back here tomorrow, God willing, to share more thoughts on and experiences with gratitude. Until then, may we all rest well and refresh and renew ourselves through sleep. So be it!