None of us are free until all of us are free!
experiments in gratitude
One of the things I am trying to develop is a greater sense of gratitude. It’s easy for me to feel thankful for the nice things in life---natural beauty, acts of compassion, simple pleasures, all that good stuff. But for the more challenging aspects of life, it’s quite difficult to say “thanks” without sarcasm.
The usual philosophy when dealing with difficult situations is to remember how fortunate you are compared to some archetype of misery like the starving children in Africa. Of course counting your blessings is a wonderful thing. Yet doing it in reference to someone else though is just scarcity in disguise. Following that technique, the key to happiness is hoping that someone else has a pitiful life. Heaven forbid we ever eradicate poverty, because then who would we look down upon to feel happy!
Another approach that I tried in developing gratitude is simply to be thankful for what I have. That’s easy when you have great things. But it’s hard to be grateful when you feel your life has gone to hell. And it’s easy to feel that way because your problem is always the worst problem in the whole world (perhaps because it is the worst problem in your world). It doesn’t matter if the problem is “I’m running late” or “I have six months to live”---it’s awful no matter the scale.
I’m trying a new approach to gratitude, one based off of ecosystems oddly enough. Everything in an ecosystem is vitally important. Predator and prey; daytime and nighttime; the earth and sky. It’s all important. If you remove one thing, everything else goes out of wack. Remove the prey, the predators die out. Remove the predator, the prey will eventually over-populate and then die out. Destroy the habitat and everything is ruined. That’s because everything is part of something greater---the ecosystem as a whole.
What does this have to do with gratitude? It illustrates a potential cornerstone, that everything is absolutely necessary to greater Being, or what I call vital importance. You’re of vital importance. Your skills, your quirks, even your faults are somehow vitally important. Everything that happens to you, good or bad, is vitally important. Sometimes the vital importance is obvious. Other times it’s less obvious. Still other times it’s a leap of faith that a character flaw or some tragedy is in the grand scheme of things absolutely necessary in the grand scheme of things.
Yet perceiving the vital importance illustrated by ecosystems changes the whole experience of gratitude, especially for difficult situations. Happy things are still wonderful. But instead of trying to be thankful for challenges, you merely need to be open to the idea that whatever you’re experiencing is somehow important. That invites insight. Then the gratitude flows naturally.
Or so I hope. It’s an experiment.
The usual philosophy when dealing with difficult situations is to remember how fortunate you are compared to some archetype of misery like the starving children in Africa. Of course counting your blessings is a wonderful thing. Yet doing it in reference to someone else though is just scarcity in disguise. Following that technique, the key to happiness is hoping that someone else has a pitiful life. Heaven forbid we ever eradicate poverty, because then who would we look down upon to feel happy!
Another approach that I tried in developing gratitude is simply to be thankful for what I have. That’s easy when you have great things. But it’s hard to be grateful when you feel your life has gone to hell. And it’s easy to feel that way because your problem is always the worst problem in the whole world (perhaps because it is the worst problem in your world). It doesn’t matter if the problem is “I’m running late” or “I have six months to live”---it’s awful no matter the scale.
I’m trying a new approach to gratitude, one based off of ecosystems oddly enough. Everything in an ecosystem is vitally important. Predator and prey; daytime and nighttime; the earth and sky. It’s all important. If you remove one thing, everything else goes out of wack. Remove the prey, the predators die out. Remove the predator, the prey will eventually over-populate and then die out. Destroy the habitat and everything is ruined. That’s because everything is part of something greater---the ecosystem as a whole.
What does this have to do with gratitude? It illustrates a potential cornerstone, that everything is absolutely necessary to greater Being, or what I call vital importance. You’re of vital importance. Your skills, your quirks, even your faults are somehow vitally important. Everything that happens to you, good or bad, is vitally important. Sometimes the vital importance is obvious. Other times it’s less obvious. Still other times it’s a leap of faith that a character flaw or some tragedy is in the grand scheme of things absolutely necessary in the grand scheme of things.
Yet perceiving the vital importance illustrated by ecosystems changes the whole experience of gratitude, especially for difficult situations. Happy things are still wonderful. But instead of trying to be thankful for challenges, you merely need to be open to the idea that whatever you’re experiencing is somehow important. That invites insight. Then the gratitude flows naturally.
Or so I hope. It’s an experiment.
Comment
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Comment by Linda Schiller-Hanna, HOST on July 8, 2008 at 3:09pm -
I think this is one of the most brilliant writings on this subject
I've ever seen. Thanks so much for sharing! It deserves wider circulation.
You might consider sending it to a spiritual magazine, for example.
Good job!
Linda
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