A Little Q and A
NOTE TO READERS: This blog recently came to the attention of a very small newly-formed group called Writers Gathered Around Thankfulness (WGAT). I was contacted about whether I would participate in an interview for their inaugural newsletter. The acronym was not without interest because WGAT also stands for “what’s great about this?” This is a question my friend Will in the Bay Area taught me to ask, about any situation no matter how seemingly dire or sad, years before I ever had thought of doing a blog about gratitude.
Of course I was flattered that this organization would want to interview me so I said sure and with their permission decided to share some of it with you. It was done over several sessions, some by email and some taped over the phone.
By the way, you won’t be able to Google this little organization, not yet anyway.
WGAT–So, first of all, where did the name Notes From the GratiDude come from anyway?
GDUDE — Great question. Well, I think I was reading Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground at the time I was working on a possible name for the blog. I had come up with a couple that were already taken and I was musing on it when I began to focus on the “Notes From the” part. And the dude part is really from The Big Lebowski, which I’ve since learned shows up often on lists of the top Buddhist movies of all time. I like Jeff Bridges’ character The Dude (“El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing”) and kind of fancied myself being like that. Something clicked about changing the second “T” to “D” in gratitude and I was off and running.
WGAT–Say more about the question “what’s great about this?” We were interested that the initials are the same as our little organization’s.
GDUDE–Well it’s just the idea that one could ask even in the worst situations, even with a loved one’s death, “what’s great about this?” Even if there’s no answer available immediately, the mere asking of it is powerful, even if you don’t mean it. My friend told me about the death of a friend and how he felt it was incumbent on him to ask that question in order to live authentically a life of gratitude. You don’t get to cherry pick. You have to say “yes” to all of it, like Joseph Campbell said. So I’ve been taking that on and using it whenever I remember and it’s very difficult to ask “what’s great about this?” in certain situations there’s no question about that. But there’s apparently some good scientific evidence that the mere asking is powerful even without an answer.
WGAT–So you’ve been keeping some sort of gratitude journal apparently for nearly ten years. How did that happen?
GDUDE–Well, I’m not really proud of this, but I originally started doing it because I was under the impression that living a life of gratitude and keeping a journal would help me become, well, I don’t know how to say it other than more financially secure, maybe even wealthy. I don’t think it was from the purest of motives. I always liked the idea of a devotional practice in principle, but what actually made me sit down and start doing it was really more like sound business advice. Over the years it has morphed into something completely different.
WGAT–Have you become wealthier?
GDUDE–I doubt we are wealthy by any meaningful standard, but maybe wealthier in spirit. I learned that gratitude practice is its own reward, no matter what the monetary ones might be.
WGAT–What do you most want readers to get when they read your blog?
GDUDE–I hope that a quick two or three minute read can be enjoyable just as a piece of writing, at the end of which one either experiences gratitude or thinks about gratitude at least every Monday and Thursday when this comes out. I think it’s like a speed bump. You read it and you have to slow down briefly and have gratitude be what’s right in front of you.
TO BE CONTINUED
