Lessons in Gratitude

Today has been a rich and full day. This morning I had a flash of inspiration about what I would write about this evening. Unfortunately that was this morning, and no sooner had I thought of the idea, I had pretty much forgotten it, much to my immense dismay, as it was pretty stellar. Alas…

Because I will be up tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. to drive my daughter to the airport for a 6 a.m. flight, I’m going to be fairly brief and specific tonight.

I am grateful for traveling mercies and how often we are kept safe by some invisible hand of fate. A good friend of mine walked away from a serious vehicle accident this morning. He was rear-ended on a highway, his vehicle striking two median walls. Both air bags deployed, the pick up truck he was driving was totaled, and he walked away relatively unharmed (he’ll likely be fairly sore in the morning…) I am so grateful that he’s alright, given what sounds like a significant accident. When things literally come down to life and death, it reminds me to keep some of the challenges I face in perspective. Tonight when I say my prayers I’ll offer up a special prayer of thanksgiving for my friend’s life, for his family who still has him, for the work he still has to do in the world. I’m grateful that he’s still here.

Tomorrow is not promised to us; in a heartbeat we can lose someone important to us or we can lose our own lives. I want to appreciate each day as best I can and hope to offer some good to the world every day. As I look back over today, I hope the volunteer work I did, as well as time I spent with my daughter, breakfast with a good friend, a brief chat with my son, and all the other little things I did over the course of the day represent a good offering for this day.

I hope tomorrow I remember the totally awesome thing I was going to write about this evening. In the meantime, I’m grateful to be able to jot down a few thoughts each day to keep the energy of gratitude crackling through the universe. What are you grateful for this evening?

It’s been an interesting day. I am pondering how successful I’ve been at eradicating the word “not” from my vocabulary. I have to confess that the previous sentence originally began with the words, “I’m not sure how successful I’ve been…” Dang it! Not is so slippery, sneaking it’s way into sentences and thoughts in completely benign and unobtrusive ways. I shudder to think how many nots in its many variations I managed to say today–a dozen would be a very modest estimate. It seems I had no sooner issued the challenge, but then, as is sometimes my want, promptly forgot all about it. So I will be back at it. Now that I’m aware that I was asleep at the wheel today, I will be much more mindful of what I say as I go through the day tomorrow.

Tonight I find myself once again thinking about the simple things that unfold over the course of a regular kind of day that make it anything but regular. I could curse the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that landed me in the series of unfortunate events that happened in my life last year, or I could be grateful for the beauty of my daughter’s face as she sleeps or the gleam that comes into my son’s eyes when he’s telling a particularly funny story. It’s the delight in a particularly funny passage in the book I am listening to or the burst of sweet-tang I experience when I bite into a cherry. It’s the evensong of the robin who sings outside my window at dusk, or the beauty of the waxing moon when it blazes through my window at night. It’s the sudden surprise reminder at the lovely view I have of the San Pablo Bay every time I turn into my housing development.

Many of these things I am able to enjoy now because of the pain I went through a year ago that pushed me out here where I was not planning to come to live. Because I had to move out of my home of six years and into a two bedroom condo, my daughter has to sleep with me most nights unless she decides to sleep down on the reasonably uncomfortable sofa. Thus, I have the pleasure of watching her sleep, as I enjoyed so very many years ago when she was a sweet baby. Because I lost my job and had too much time on my hands I discovered the beauty of volunteering and have enjoyed working with a wonderful crew of volunteers who surpass the quality and character of many of the people I’ve worked with in paid jobs.

Sometimes I’ve gotten frustrated at how often I am encouraged to see the lessons in all the losses I suffered, to make lemonade out of the lemons, and all those cliches well-meaning people say because they’re uncertain what else to say. But the truth is I choose to see the positives that have emerged from the wreckage of my former life; to do otherwise would be to risk plunging into a self pitying, depressed, angry human being. And that has been unacceptable to me. So I remain grateful in spite of and perhaps in some ways because of all that has happened over the past 18 months or so. This too will pass, all the well-meaning people assure me, and they’re correct, it will pass. But it’s up to me as to how it will pass. To the best of my ability it will be with as much grace and gratitude as I can muster.

(Note: I have highlighted the word not and a particularly devious form of not that I will be hard pressed to eradicate: “Un.” For the most part un, like not is one of those quietly negative prefixes that also wends its way through my language. It is scarcely possible to truly strip the word not and its cousin un from my vocabulary, but it’s a good exercise in learning to speak in the affirmative. It’s hard work, but very worthwhile!

Whew, it was hot today. Normal temps here in the Bay area in June can be between about 60 and 80 degrees. Today it was about 102 here where I live. And us with no air conditioning. Saints preserve us!

I am grateful this evening for having a sense of accomplishment. I have a lot to get done. I spent some time sorting, organizing and packing a few boxes. I’m preparing for a move that could possibly take place sometime in the next eight to ten weeks. It would be helpful to know where I’m going. It would take quite a while to explain all the various life twists and turns that have me planning for a move, and that is not the focus of this blog. Instead I will say that even though I don’t know where I’m going, I’m starting to be pretty sure that I’m going. It’s just a matter of the when and the where. Life can funny like that. One day things seem to be relatively clear and straightforward and the next all hell can break loose and nothing appears to be at all straightforward and clarity is nowhere to be found, having become obscured by some insane, malevolent fog.

By now, of course, I have learned to flow with it, as best I can. The uncertainties have abounded in various degrees for over a year. So if I don’t know exactly where I’ll be going, I can still manage to get myself as prepared for it as possible. It could be across town, it could be across the country. It all remains to be seen. I am grateful to be learning how to deal with uncertainty; real life is, after all, full of it. Things are much more uncertain than we’d like to believe. I looked up the word uncertain in the dictionary just now, mostly so I wouldn’t keep using it repeatedly in this paragraph, and here are some of the synonyms for it: “unknown, debatable, open to question, in doubt, undetermined, unsure, in the balance, up in the air; unpredictable, unforeseeable,” etc. Yep, that begins to describe how it is.

The Buddhists talk about impermanence as one of the three marks of human existence. Things are transitory, always in flux and this is a good thing. Except of course that many of us didn’t receive the memo. We’ve been led to fear or at the very least be unsettled by change. I myself haven’t always been a big fan of it. But change is completely inevitable; it is in fact one thing we can count on: the changing nature of everything. So I am learning to embrace the unknown, unpredictable, and unforeseeable and trying to relax and become comfortable with the uncertainty. It’s going to happen anyway, I might as well learn to roll with it.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote the famous words, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry].” No matter how I plan and scheme and figure, I can’t control how things are going to turn out. So, as I prepare for my move, it seems completely congruent with the wacky incongruence that has been my life that I have no idea where I’m moving to or when. Nevertheless, I’ll continue getting ready. And if perchance it turns out that I’m not moving after all, I suppose I’ll have to roll with that too and be as gracious about it as I possibly can. Given the choice to go willingly with gratitude and a sense of humor and adventure or to go grudgingly with a sense of gloom and doom, I think I’ll go with gratitude. But I bet you knew I’d say that!

(Please enjoy the smooth sounds of Nina Simone as she sings “Everything Must Change.” Listen to and resonate with the words…)

It would be pointless for me to once again lament the speediness with which this week has passed. I bet if I went back to my blog over the past several Thursdays I would find the same sentiment expressed week after week: where did the week go? I could easily ask the same question about where June has gone and, as we approach the midpoint of the year, where 2012 has gone. We are six months away from the end of the Mayan calendar and the end of who knows what else. As for me, this is simply the end of another day, very nearly the end of another week, and I am grateful.

The prayer from the New Zealand prayerbook (1989) that I say to myself most nights has a line that says, “What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.” Good advice. There were a number of things I had wanted to get done this week and I’ve perhaps gotten some of them done. A larger proportion of them remains on the to-do-list and I still hold out some hope that I’ll be able to scratch them off the list by Sunday evening and the start of another work week. But should I not accomplish all the things on my now running to-do-list, I have no choice but to let it be. My fretting over what I did not accomplish does not accomplish anything either other than make my head hurt, my stomach upset and my energy crackle with frustration. Doesn’t sound particularly profitable or effective. “Who” the writer asks, “can add one inch to her height by worrying?” It’s pointless to fret. That being the case, what is an effective approach to the things that didn’t get accomplished? “Let it be” is a very practical if passive response. How about this: be grateful and celebrate what you did manage to get done rather than dwell on what you didn’t? That moves it from the realm of the negative (feel guilty) through the neutral (let it be) all the way to the positive (celebrate the accomplishments).

This morning I was quite fretful about the magnitude of things on my to-do-list–not simply the number of things I feel like I need to get done but also the scope and scale of what I need to do. It all felt a bit overwhelming this morning and I felt the weight of it pressing me early into the day. Nevertheless, I will take care of one or two things on my list tonight before I go to bed, and then tomorrow I’ll strategize what I need to do and how I can manage to make a dent into the list. I am in a pretty intense planning phase: over the next six weeks or so I expect to make some pretty significant decisions about where I’m going to be living and perhaps what I’m going to be doing. Not too much is clear at the moment, but my guess is that big changes are coming very soon. Somehow I have to get ready for them, mentally, emotionally, and physically. I am hopeful that I can approach them with as much equanimity as I can muster.

I am grateful for the day. It was long (I spent 90 minutes in traffic for a commute that usually only takes 30-40), I worked hard, which was a good thing, and there were leftovers so I didn’t have to cook when I finally got home. This weekend a whole lot more working hard will hopefully happen, but also some play time of one sort or another, I hope. We shall see. Whatever I do manage to accomplish, I’m going to celebrate.

Today I am mostly grateful for how the day unfolded. There really wasn’t anything at all extraordinary about the day; it followed the usual pattern of waking early, writing in my journal, morning ablutions, oatmeal for breakfast, then out the door to work. I continue to be grateful for the contract work I am doing: I have relatively steady income that’s been helping to keep us afloat. I am grateful for the work, though it is in an area in which I have no previous experience. The job requires me largely to do administrative support kinds of work on a variety of different projects, and while it doesn’t use much of my academic training and work experience, it is work I can do and I am grateful for it. Because it is contract work, there are slow times when I don’t work and therefore don’t get paid, so I am all the more grateful for days like this and work over the past few weeks when there’s been enough to keep me busy.

Today as I arrived at work I offered a dedication that everything I did–every effort I made at work, every interaction I had with people, everything I did over the course of the day at work and home–be done for the good of all beings. I would say I learned about this concept during my recent studies of Buddhism and mindfulness practice, but honestly I learned it as a child when I first learned the “Morning Offering” prayer–one in which you offer all your prayers, works, joys, and suffering of that day. There were a lot of other things involved in the prayer about  salvation of souls and such that I no longer really attend to, but the basic idea has stuck with me all these decades later. Let the good that I do today, whatever that looks like–great or small–be somehow offered for the good of everyone; that if any good comes of it, we all benefit in some way. There’s a verse that says, “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory of God.” There’s a theme here for me–it’s not about dogma or doctrine or religiosity. It’s about offering whatever I’m doing as a gift to better the world in some small way.

The notions of gratitude and generosity fit together. We are grateful for the blessings we’ve been given–the things that add richness and meaning to our lives. We give of ourselves, offer our gifts up to the world each day. We give out of our abundance and often we give out of our need. Sometimes the world gives us something in return, though this is not why we give. The gift is in the giving itself. I am grateful to have the capacity to give, to share something of my gifts and talents, and when I can, of my financial means. One of the deep disappointments about my tenuous, sometimes precarious financial situation has been that I have not been able to financially support charities and nonprofits whom I believe are doing such good work in the world. While I do still manage to support a few of them, it has been only a fraction of what I have been able to give in the past. This has been a discouraging, if only temporary situation. I look forward to being able to give again soon. But in the meantime, I have found other ways to contribute, to give of myself. I volunteer my time in service to others and I donate clothes and such things as I have to help the community. This is not about “See what a good person I am.” It’s about looking around and finding ways to offer gifts the world. And tonight, before I take my rest I will offer all the accomplishments I did manage in this day for the good of everyone. And, I will be grateful.