I'm writing this before knowing who won and feeling slightly worried about the state of things.
But, you know, that's also where gratitude comes in. I've been writing about gratitude since I began my list of 1000 Awesome Things way back in 2008. I don't think I knew it so obviously then. Maybe it will help to start with a definition. I like what Robert Emmons (b. 1958), University of California gratitude researcher and author of 'The Little Book of Gratitude,' says:
Living gratefully begins with affirming the good and recognizing its sources. It is the understanding that life owes me nothing and all the good I have is a gift...
I like that! Let's start there. "All the good I have is a gift." If we start there then we pretty quickly can start feeling grateful ... for everything else. I'm lucky to be writing this. You're lucky to be reading it. We're lucky underground wires and flying satellites are letting us have this conversation. Lucky our eyeballs work! Lucky they can convert pixel streaks into thoughts! Never mind how lucky we both are to even have the time to chat like this.
Emmons calls gratitude "fertilizer of the mind" which helps to "spread connections and improve function in nearly every realm of experience." He said six years ago in 2018 in a "Science of Gratitude" paper that "Research suggests that gratitude inspires people to be more generous, kind, and helpful (or “prosocial”); strengthens relationships, including romantic relationships; and may improve the climate in workplaces." And even earlier than that, in 2013, on Daily Good he said that "grateful people are more resilient to stress, whether minor everyday hassles or major personal upheavals." This all makes sense! When we're focused on the positive the negative doesn't make as much of a mental clang.
Of course, my own attempts at gratitude are much smaller. Pithier! I started writing one "awesome thing" a day on June 20, 2008 and I ... never stopped. Over 150,000 people still read my new daily awesome thing (you can sign up here) and a few recent ones include "Getting late to hockey but making it on the ice in time," "When someone compliments your glasses," and "The smell of warm clothes when you open the dryer."
I'm a court jester next to the wise, sagacious Mary Oliver (1935-2019), though. I have posted poems of hers before like "Don't Hesitate" and "The Sun" and while writing this I came across "Messenger" which is a new fave:
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.
To close off I dug up a book called, fittingly, 'Gratitude' by Oliver Sachs (1933-2015), the British neurologist and naturalist perhaps most famous for writing the book that became the movie Awakenings.
I like this quote:
There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
I love that. "An intercourse with the world." Maybe that's what gratitude is ... just having that (uh) daily world intercourse. Where you see the bugs and the flowers and the birds and the trees and the smiles and the sunsets and, well, all of it, as a wondrous gift.
Can we live in that mindset all the time? No! Of course not. But that's why we have these conversations—these re-visitings—to just help keep steering ourselves slowly back to awe.
We are very grateful to be here. I am grateful for your love and energy along the way.
Thanks, as always, for being here. And you can invite others into our community here.
Neil
Is this the most famous gratitude letter of all time?
Here's a two-minute way to practice gratitude each day.