Gratikido, Inc
I think it is important from time to time to remind readers that I’m not sitting in an office somewhere with a sign on the door that says Gratitude, Inc. I haven’t been hired as a regular contributor with some kind of special expertise in this area, using the nom de plume “GratiDude.” I don’t own a company that helps clients feel more gratitude in their lives. This is just down and dirty stuff, drawn often times from journal notes, where pen was poised over paper, helping me work on what gratitude means to me and what a practice might look like.
It does seem axiomatic that reaching for gratitude doesn’t always cause an immediate mood switch or help you make a hard phone call or have a better workout or lose weight or feel better because a family member has cancer. The effect may be cumulative, though, like acupuncture treatments are said to be, or medical cannabis. The accretion of many, many days, as Proust put it at the end of In Search of Lost Time. The slow accretion idea seems to be a powerful model.
OK, so for what am I grateful today? Where do things stand? At the very least, there is power in the attempt, in the question “for what am I grateful today?” It’s perhaps like Rilke’s idea about learning to love the question.
This is what he said, in Letters to a Young Poet–“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Learn to love the question. Or, welcome the question, like an opponent on the dojo mat. Maybe even love the opponent, in Aikido terms, which is the martial art with which I am most familiar. Every maneuver requires that you look in the same direction, however briefly, as your opponent. You see the world that way and for a short amount of time you might say “Yeah, it really does suck that he has cancer, no arguing that. Hard to see any good in it.” Then you just keep moving through it.
I’m just asking questions, you see, and letting them get answered. Or perhaps not answered, not today anyway. Sometimes I generate bountiful lists of what I’m grateful for and on other days, it’s more difficult.
Live the questions now. What a relief, for those who would live a gratitude-inspired life. You don’t have to sit there and beat yourself up for not feeling grateful in any given moment, for not being able to generate a long list of all the good things in your life, wondering what kind of ungrateful wreck of a human being you are. It will suffice to just ask the question, for what am I grateful, and then be patient, let it percolate, love and live the question, as our German poet says, and maybe even live into the answer.
