What are you grateful for?
A gratitude post just in time for the holidays…minus the sugarcoating.
Stop your scroll! This is not another article about “how to start a daily gratitude list.” This is a post about taking an honest look at your gratitude list and then realizing that half of it—the challenges in your life you’d rather not think about—is missing. Read below for my recent lessons learned about gratitude in the labyrinth, my recently deceased parents’ home, and the tattoo parlor to learn both sides of the coin of gratitude, and be sure to read all the way to the bottom and let me know if this post makes you think of the question “What are you grateful for?” in a completely new way.
It started with a tattoo…
At the age of 58 as I was considering getting my first tattoo, I was told to look at other peoples’ tattoos and ask them who did their work. Katherine, a dear friend, had also just gotten her first “ink,” which somehow gave me permission. It is a beautiful line of script gracing the ulna bone side of her forearm… a beloved quote you may already know.
“Even after all this time, the sun doesn’t say to the earth, you owe me. Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky.”
Hafiz’s presentation of the boundless nature of cosmic gratitude is both inspiring and aspirational, and yet, if we’re being honest with ourselves and with each other, it seems there are moments in our everyday life where the light seems to not always be there, everywhere. Sometimes, when there is daylight shining over you, there may be a nighttime heavy darkness hovering over me.
As we approach Thanksgiving, I decided to ask a few people for their thoughts on gratitude and how they use it in their lives.
It took me through a labyrinth…
I recently hiked with a dear friend who is suffering for various reasons. Along the path, we each shared what we were going through. We reached the labyrinth at the top of a hill in her neighborhood, and we both stepped in. Along the way, I reached down toward a heart-shaped rock. It broke in half when I picked it up. So I replaced it on the ground. Two steps later, I found another heart shaped rock and picked that up. I carried it to the center, along with two feathers I found along the way, all the while wondering why I didn’t pick up the broken heart and carry that to the center. When we emerged from the labyrinth, my friend nodded and said to me, “healing is possible.”
After our hike, she invited me into her home for tea. Her 13-year old daughter was just waking up pulling off her night eye mask and smiling in her flannel jammies. She joined us on the couch. I asked her for her thoughts on gratitude.
“Gratitude.” She said, with air quotes. “It’s really trendy. Like a tacky t-shirt. But I guess it’s good that more people are aware of it.”
I smiled and thought of Krista Tippet, in her podcasts where she talks about gratitude and the generative landscape and how this next generation just might provide so much healing for so many through the practice of gratitude.
Meanwhile, my friend sat on the couch tapping each finger with her thumbs and said, “I wake up with gratitude every morning and use my 10 fingers to list 10 things I’m grateful for, but my therapist says, I need to watch out for that. She says I could be “bypassing” and not really looking at the other darker stuff. Which I guess I’m supposed to be grateful for also.”
It’s easy to be grateful for life’s “10,000 joys,” but what about its “10,000 sorrows?” Cultivating an awareness of the gifts of adversity can help us to not only weather the difficult storms of our lives but also come out wiser and more compassionate than ever before.
True gratitude isn’t limited to experiences of joy, love, and pleasure, as Vipassana teacher Jack Kornfield emphasizes. “In certain temples that I’ve been to,” he says, “there’s actually a prayer that you say asking for difficulties: ‘May I be given the appropriate difficulties so that my heart can truly open with compassion.’ Imagine asking for that.”
I was sharing this with another friend, who several years ago lost a young daughter. She told me, “You can’t just be grateful for the good stuff—that’s easy—but to be grateful for all of it, for everything- it opens up your heart and your life in unimaginable ways. To practice true gratitude, is to be grateful for ALL of life’s offerings… everything.”
It brought me to my recently deceased parents’ home…
I had been suffering from a great deal of grief after the deaths of my parents. My friend suggested I listen to a podcast called, “Is This All There Is” with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. In it he describes cleaning out his mother’s apartment. His mother Gloria Vanderbilt kept everything and attached notes to many items. For example, “Anderson, this is what I was wearing when I watched your brother jump out the window. Anderson this is the suit your father was wearing when he had his heart attack and died.”
In his podcast, Anderson invites talk show host Stephen Colbert to discuss grief. When Colbert was 11, his father and two brothers died in a plane crash. He explains, “There is a delineation for me. And after many years, I’ve grown a gratitude for the grief.”
Another friend, Beth H. said “Yeah, gratitude is NOT my first thought in the morning. I wake up and say, a breathy—Oh fuck!…and then I make myself compose a gratitude list. And I do know that I don’t have to look too far to find what I’m grateful for.”
Beth H. is a person who practices generosity of spirit and time. Four days after my mother died, I was telling Beth I needed to clean out my mom’s apartment. She asked if I needed help.
“No,” I said, “I’ve got this, it’s ok.”
She said, “No one should do that alone.”
I surrendered and received her help. She drove 1.5 hours both ways. We spent six hours filling bags, loading our cars, and delivering the items to Goodwill. I was so grateful.
It ended with a tattoo.
The late Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh often said, No mud… no lotus. He referred to the lotus flower which blooms out of the mud; the beauty of its growth is rooted in the dirt and grime. As the metaphor goes, it is from suffering that we learn compassion, from loss that we learn understanding, and from overcoming struggles that we come to discover our own strength and beauty. These struggles may just be the “appropriate difficulties” that we need in order to grow in gratitude.
My oldest daughter, Sydney, held my hand while Marcello the tattoo artist drew the lotus tattoo on my forearm. The unalom shape has twists and turns which represent life growing into a lotus blooming with rays of light radiating from the petals.
For me each person, conversation, connection, and interaction (pleasant and unpleasant) weaves together a tapestry of messy and beautiful that makes up my life, and I’m so grateful for all of teachings. After all—no mud…no lotus.
For what are you grateful today?
My hope is that this post gives you permission to grapple with the concept (and virtue!) of gratitude in a way that feels rooted in reality and not overly idealistic or out of touch. Consider me your meditation teacher who lives in the world with feet navigating the uneven ground of everyday life…not far away in a cave on a mountaintop. Feel free to reach out to me directly at any time here. I love to hear from you.