Difficulties are also blessings

To appreciate life, we must see it all

My brother Frank was diagnosed with muscular sclerosis in his 50s. In the following decades he wrote a series of essays about life. I was shocked when he sent me an essay titled “Thank You, Lord, for Giving Me MS.” What? How could he be grateful for that? He went on to explain that the disease “took away much but added the precious compensating gift of time.” He had to leave his job, and thus had many more years with the freedom to write.

Frank could have spent the rest of his life feeling sorry for himself and complaining about his situation. In fact, over the years, as his disease progressed, I never heard him complain. He just kept adapting, first to a cane, then to an electric scooter. He died at 82, from a heart attack, not from MS. He had never stopped writing, and he never stopped being both grateful and cheerful. All his life he had been a runner, running for the sheer joy of it, decades before it became popular. He lost that, but his love of writing compensated for it.

When Thanksgiving comes around, our thoughts turn to life’s blessings, to the things that give us joy, that sustain us. We don’t usually think of our difficulties as something to be grateful for.

This Thanksgiving, I gave thanks for my health — and the insurance to pay for it! — my family, the roof over my head, and the food on my table. Every day I’m thankful for sunshine and rain, for air to breathe and water to drink, the birdsong that cheers me. I’m aware of how extremely fortunate I am, even with the challenges of getting old. There are no armed soldiers in my streets, no bombs falling on my house. Prices are high, but the stores shelves are full, water comes out of my faucet whenever I summon it, and the lights always go on at the flick of a switch. I take these things for granted, until the news reminds me that many people around the world have none of them. I am blessed beyond measure.

So why do I mention the challenges? Because to appreciate life we must encompass all of it, and difficulty is part of the life that is granted to us. In the long run, we benefit from the hardships, although it may take a while to see it. When we take the long view, when we open ourselves to recognizing the compensating balances in life, the difficult times take on meaning. They add another dimension to life: Our view of the world would be two-dimensional without its shadows.

Gratefulness opens our hearts to all of life, to the gift of life itself. It is a necessary component of the spiritual life every day, not just on Thanksgiving. Gratitude undergirds the relationship between ourselves and All That Is, and that means accepting the hard with the easy. However long it takes, and however grudgingly, we eventually understand that it all refines us.