Gratitude
It’s just past the Gregorian New Year, and as usual, I’m not making resolutions. It’s never been my practice, and anyway, my to-do list is more than enough for the semester ahead, and the bodhisattva vows more than enough for endless lifetimes. I’m thinking, instead, about gratitude — for all that’s happened over the past year — and how I’d like to share it.
Which is new for me. For most of my life, gratitude’s been something I’ve rarely been keen on giving. After all, gratitude can be profoundly oppressive when demanded — used often to extract the filial “duty” to bear children for one’s parents, enthusiasm from a worker “lucky” to have a job, or obedience from a citizen “fortunate” for the precarious stability of their young nation. For the privileged, it can also be pacifying, a vague sense of thanks that allows one to feel good about what one has, without quite knowing where it comes from. Diffuse and directionless, gratitude can depoliticize the recognition of privilege, obscuring the fact one tends to have “good fortune” only because so many others do not, encouraging docile appreciation even though action is the appropriate response.
No surprise then, that I’ve long viewed calls for gratitude with suspicion. Who’s doing the calling, and to what end? What reasons for giving it have we internalized? These are questions I still think we should always ask. But against my own expectations, I’ve begun to learn this: Gratitude can be incredibly liberating — and joyful too — as long as it’s freely given. In giving it, or even just bringing it to mind, it shows how so much of what we tend to attribute to ourselves — ideas, achievements, ways of viewing and thinking — are in fact due to an infinite array of causes and conditions, not the least of which are the wisdom, compassion, and tutelage of others; the generations that have fought for our right to exist, and those who continue to fight, to teach, to love. With that recognition, the ego begins to drop away. No longer is it me against the world, but us against the forces of tragedy and time. Away goes the ever-recurring habit of self-judgement — both the “Look at what I’ve accomplished!” and the “Am I doing enough?” — and in it’s place comes the freedom of collective joy — “Look at what we’ve managed to do!” and “Whatever that remains, we’ll do it together.”
It’s not that I’ve never experienced gratitude in this way before, it’s just that it’s almost always been by circumstance — a state I fall into because of some external stimulus, in a moment when I’m feeling particularly open and generous. But what I’ve been learning is that it’s possible to experience gratitude both as a matter of habit and a matter of choice — to notice increasingly one’s egoistic worries, then dissolve them naturally with gratefulness (along with a light-hearted chuckle at one’s ‘self’). And it’s not that the worries disappear, it’s that they’re transformed so that the self is no longer their sole focus. In this way, I’ve been learning too, gratitude need not have a sedative effect, inducing apolitical acceptance of things as they are. Instead, it affirms and empowers, allowing us to recognize how much others have already done, how we’re just part of a great endeavor for that which is right and good, and how there could be nothing more natural than to want to pay that forward. True gratitude does not placate — it inspires.
And so on that note, I’d like to express my love and gratitude for all that’s made the past year at times bearable and at times hopeful, at times survivable and at times delightful; for all you givers who give, without whom I’d not be giving; for all you fighters who fight, who push me to keep on fighting; for those who’ve taught me and led me, without whom I’d have not found a path; for those who walk it beside me, ensuring the journey will last; for those whom I work and give care with, and your wisdom and kindness and warmth; for those I am making new friends with, and conversations yet to go on; for those who have studied and learned with me, for the scholarly jokes and asides; for those who do not just agree with me, from prompting more care on what’s right; for those who’ve shared the stage with me, and your art and your grace and your pride; for all of you who have lived with me, your company, laughter and joy; for those who’ve held me and stayed with me, when I could not do so alone; for those who still here embrace me, in this home that is not always home.
May what you have given return many-fold, for all of us, and innumerable more.
