Empowered by a groundswell of gratitude
It’s been going on for about a month now, except when I forget, but that happens less often these days. It takes a few minutes each night.
Not so much the typing, but the thinking, sifting through events, encounters, experiences. And getting the wording the way I want it, because let’s face it, that’s my job.
But it’s become such a worthwhile exercise, such an effective way of shifting my mindset onto a more productive, more generous plane, that I absolutely need to do it.
On Thursday night, the last time I did it before sitting down to write this, it got me thinking about the great colleagues I have, about how they’d helped so much to get me out of the office in time to catch the opening night of the South Canterbury Drama League’s outstanding Showstoppers 2 that evening.
Shameless plug, because I know several participants, but if you’re within striking distance and haven’t seen it yet, please try to get to one of today’s performances if the weather allows.
Being there got me thinking about how privileged, and overawed, I feel to be in a choir with several of those talented people. It moved me emotionally, too, especially during fellow Rhyth-Mix Singers member Emma Gilkison’s performance of ‘‘Love Never Dies’’.
There was a moment, when she hit her top note, that felt utterly other-worldly.
It also got me thinking, fondly, of funny exchanges with both my student daughters in Christchurch that day, about being sure they had food in, in case the coming rain trapped them in their places of residence.
In short, it sent me to bed feeling pretty good.
It makes me think now, with a fair degree of shame, of an occasion a few weeks ago when I heard someone close to me was heading off on another dream trip and my reaction was ugly – it was envy, angry envy. And it was dead wrong.
I ranted a bit. My partner and my older daughter could both tell you about that, and it’s appropriate that they were two of the first three people I mentioned when I started this exercise, my younger daughter the other.
‘‘Why don’t we ever get to go on trips like that? We work just as bloody hard as they do?’’ I yelled. The exact wording may have been a little stronger than that, but you get my drift.
Although I wished them well as they departed, it wasn’t what you’d call a kind response, given the feeling behind it. But the venting accomplished little in lifting my mood. It just put me into a funk I took most of the day to get out of, and the subsequent Facebook posts kept taking me back there.
Around that time I began to see a friend’s tweets at the end of each day talking about people, events, situations, with the hashtag #grateful.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of someone writing such a daily list. A dear uni friend has done it on Facebook for a while and I’ve known many others to practise it privately.
For some reason, though, these tweets particularly resonated with me, and I asked about them. My friend pointed to another friend as her inspiration, and the latter spoke of the realisation that ‘things’, ‘stuff’, seldom came in near the top of her list. Invariably people stood out.
So I started tweeting my lists, and thinking about why it was such a powerful tool, and on one morning run on the beach, something I’m eternally grateful to be able to do regularly, it hit me, to quote another old friend from uni days, ‘‘like a brick in the head’’.
Gratitude is an empowering emotion.
If I think of what I have – and let’s face it, I have so much more than most people: great partner, wonderful kids, loving family, fantastic friends, a good job, just for starters – rather than what I don’t have, it empowers me. Rather than clinging jealously to what little I believe I have, realising how much I have frees me to be generous, not only with resources, but time and energy.
It frees me up, in short, to be kinder.
As I thought more about gratitude I realised it has the power to take us away from the entitled way some have – and if I’m brutally honest, I’ve probably had in the past - of thinking of material blessings as a divine right, rather than gifts, privileges. It can take us away from the warped idea some in this country clearly have that they’re somehow more worthy than others because they have more, when most often that’s purely an accident of birth.
It has the power to help us relate to people, no matter their position or socio-economic status, as equals.
Imagine, I thought, in this week when it’s been so prominent, if our welfare system was predicated on gratitude for what we as a country have? And please don’t tell me we don’t have much. How much kinder would it then be towards those unfortunate enough to need it than the adversarial experience so many people have spoken of?
And then, despite the blatantly racist letter we received this week calling it a ‘‘forgotten language’’, I found my way back to Maori, and the concept of ‘‘aroha’’.
The other part of the definition I quoted in last week’s column on kindness says ‘‘aroha encompasses the breath of life and the creative force of the spirit, and it assumes that the universe is abundant and that there are more opportunities than people’’.
Abundance. That’s what I have. And I’m truly grateful.