Discovering gratitude amid the roller coaster of news
Even as we wished each other Happy New Year last week, it seemed obvious 2019 would likely envelop us in wave after wave of unwelcome drama. If the year’s first few days offer a telling foretaste, the stock market will give us a ride like an old Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair, the 2020 election runup will devolve into ugly rounds of name-calling and “gotcha” games, and unless someone builds a big, beautiful wall around the White House, unpredictable whims and rumors thereof will threaten to consume our every waking moment. If you don’t thrive on chaos, anger, and duels fought with nasty words at 10 paces, you’ll need some hiding places, diversions, and sanity preservers.
No matter how much or how little influence we have over the exercise of power in our communities and nation, each of us must learn to discern what things we can and cannot change and then expend our personal resources and energies where we can truly help, not merely fret and fume. What does helping look like? For starters, it honors the genuine humanity of everyone present, however odd or fragile. Unhelpful alternatives include every behavior that somehow dehumanizes oneself or others.
Begin the practice of sanity-saving by taking every opportunity to sit for a time with someone near to dying. Hold their hands in yours. Ask what they think about, what makes them most grateful. Listen carefully. Read a poem. Sing old songs that have dug deep ruts on both your souls. You can’t keep someone from dying, but together, you will honor the gift of the one life each of you will get on this planet, and you will see again what really matters in life — connection, sharing, love and gratitude for simply being human, together, in this brief intersection of time and space.
Then take that gratitude and wisdom into every workplace and escape venue you have. None of us can stop or change the shifting mix of backgrounds and languages around us, but we have great control over whether we live among friends or wall ourselves into estranged, shrinking ghettos. Friends are merely strangers we have welcomed, or who have welcomed us, helped us, enriched our lives. Life is too short to spend on cultivating enemies.
Watch films and read books, especially history and fiction, and thereby enter worlds you could never reach through travel and become familiar with people you can never touch except through the gifts of narrative and imagination, two of humankind’s most precious capacities. You will find yourself thankful not only for the talents of good writers and filmmakers, but also for your newfound familiarity with some of your real-live neighbors who once seemed so strange you could never imagine them as friends.
If you love sports and the partial escape they can still provide from the real world’s insanities and injustices, immerse yourself. But beware of the joy-robbing poison of media analysts who would have you believe anything less than a national championship renders a season of competing little more than dust and ashes. Ponder instead the pain of training, the hours of practice, and the love of a game that makes young bodies keep trying, and sometimes succeeding, at impossible feats. Losers often perform as beautifully as winners. Applaud both, for each side has given you an equally precious gift.
Resentment over what we believe we should have but don’t cunningly poisons our souls and blinds us to the gifts we do have. Even if we must fight for justice, gratitude remains the best respite for souls that need a safe hiding place.