Clarity for Teachers: Day 33

‘All the clarity you have comes from the example of others. Everyone deserves gratitude.’

It seems like one of the gentle ones, doesn’t it? Sitting with this advice a while, though, I find that it gets uneasy.

Maybe I can say in good conscience that everyone I’ve dealt with in my life so far deserves gratitude. I can draw lessons from that headteacher who preached a whole assembly on my sinfulness when I was ten years old. ‘Most of us are more sinned against than sinning,’ my mum will say. On balance, though, I’d guess that I’ve caused as much pain through acts of carelessness as others have caused me. The thing is, I’ve known people whose lives so far look very different, who have been on the receiving end of acts of cruelty that it’s hard to even think about. It’s a harder ask for some than others, this claim that everyone deserves gratitude.

‘It’s very strange where you come from,’ says Martín Prechtel. ‘It seems to me that where you come from, everybody wakes up every day expecting to live.’

I came across these remarks in Stephen Jenkinson’s book Die Wise, where he muses on what Prechtel is getting at. How else might one wake up? It could sound as though those who don’t wake up with this expectation ‘have been robbed of it by the fatalism of their religion or the squalor of their daily life or the resignation to a basic misery of their high infant mortality rate, or the like.’ But this would be a misunderstanding, Jenkinson suggests, and one that cuts to the strangeness of our ways of living: the alternative is not that you wake up expecting to die, it is that you might wake up with a sense of your life as a gift, ‘something mysteriously good’; not an entitlement or a reward for living right, but a source of wonder and an occasion for gratitude.

So maybe there’s a turn here — a clue that, far from gratitude coming easier to those whose lives have been easiest, the need for gratitude becomes acute when the experience of life strips us of any illusion of entitlement?

‘Expecting to live is the training wheels on the spaceship of our entitlement,’ writes Jenkinson. Expectations become demands, rights, grounds for indignation. I suspect there’s a connection between this kind of entitlement and the idea that my achievements are those of a self-sufficient individual, rather than arising from a web of relationships.

There can be a relief in surrendering the burden of entitlement, in acknowledging that any clarity I have comes from the example of others, rather being my own self-contained achievement, and in meeting the world with gratitude rather than expectation.

Västerås, 20 April, 2020

This is the thirty-third in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.