Category: Gratitude

This is What Love Looks Like

I will not say that my father was a hoarder, but he was an academic, an artist and a collector of books and items related to his academic, artistic and other interests. His attitude might be summarized as — why throw things away when we have an attic… a basement… a garage? When he died he left behind enough stuff to populate three yard sales a year for the first few years, and some since then.

A truly lovely and thoughtful thing that my mother is doing for her children is making an ongoing attempt to cull through our house’s half-century of accumulated items so that it does not fall so heavily on our shoulders when the time comes.  To that end, she tries to help us help ourselves by asking us — each time we visit — to do some culling of our own.

“Just go through your box,” she says.

“What box?”

“I made you each a box.”

Here is “my box” compiled by Mom.  Newspaper clippings — dean’s list and classroom citizenship awards,  reading achievement certificates, poems, drawings and stories…

IMG_4671

 

My publishing peak was clearly in elementary school.

Beyond the fact that my peak publishing success was in elementary school,  I am a struck by my mother’s diligence in tucking these items away in a semi-organized fashion so consistently,  for so many years.

But, more than anything, I see the kind of life and opportunities that allowed for this collection of paperwork — and the people who made it possible–in particular, my mother. My mother used coupons at grocery store and never had a manicure — but managed our money so there were music lessons,  orthodontia, and the dance classes that she drove me to and sat through week after week. There were stories  at bedtime, tennis at the park. Rides to the pool and swimming lessons, nightly practice spelling tests. Day after day, in a million ways, my parents provided.

“Think about what you’ll want to pay to ship or store,” my mom says. Which is practical and good advice.  I manage to prune away a few dozen math worksheets and duplicate theater programs, but I don’t get far with emptying the box.

Looking at individual items I don’t think there is anything specific I would miss if it were gone. But when I look at this collection, I see how much I’ve been loved–

–and I don’t know how to throw that away yet.

 

Nothing Seems Fair, Part 2

In my last post I mentioned my friend who is having issues with his health and posted on Facebook the status, “nothing seems fair anymore.”  His post got an overwhelming response, because he has so many friends who love him, and also, i think because they are words that hit a cord with all of us.  Because we all suffer, and we all cannot help but notice that some of us seem to suffer more than others.  And what is that all about?  How can we reconcile that we want things, but we don’t get the things that we want–other people get them.  And the things we have, other people want:  Jobs, respect, human rights, health, economic security, freedom from fear and pain. What can we do to avoid being overwhelmed by the UNFAIRNESS of it all?

Last night I attended this mindfullness group I sometimes go to on campus after work.  We had a guest speaker who talked about neuroplasticity, and how we can form new neural pathways and change our temperments and the way we think and feel about events and circumstances. Apparently, through evolution, humans have developed a negative bias when we look at the world, because back in the day it wasn’t as important to remember all the nights that you ducked into a cave and it was empty so you had a good sleep or campfire with roasted elk-meat as it was  to remember the one time you ducked into a cave and found a BEAR inside. The UNPLEASANT experience of running from the bear and shivering in the cold hiding behind a rock was the one you needed to remember in order to avoid the bear caves in the future!

Nowadays, the “negative bias” doesn’t always serve us so well. Say twenty people compliment your outfit but one person makes a snide remark. In this case, focusing on the one negative comment is unnecessary for survival, and bad for your mood. All else being equal, why not think about the nice things that people said, and be happier? And maybe because you’re happier, you’ll be nicer and maybe that will lead to better relationships…etc.

However  (according to this guest speaker’s summary of several books), because we aren’t naturally wired to think about the good things, we have to consciously practice, until our brains starts to do it naturally.  Much of it sounded very similar to cultivating gratitude, of which I’m a fan.

The speaker  gave an example of an exercise where you find something pleasant but overlooked to meditate upon, like “how nice it is to breathe, to have enough air.”  When she said this, I thought, “that’s right! It is pretty awesome to breathe.” And I felt grateful!

WARNING: This is where I should end this blog post, but instead I’m going to veer off track…

…which I think maybe our guest speaker did as well, as I think what she said next was something that occurred to her in the moment and not part of her teaching plan. She said, “I have a friend who has cancer, and when we talked the other day, he told me he was having trouble breathing, that he couldn’t get enough air anymore.”

I think she simply intended to just emphasize even how the simple act of breathing is something to appreciate, kind of like a parent tossing off an aside about being thankful for your food because of starving children in Africa. She didn’t dwell on it. But I did. I am still dwelling.

While statements about other people’s misfortunes can make us feel lucky, I’m not sure they make us happy.  I wonder what kind of neural pathways are formed if one makes a practice of appreciating a thing by contemplating that thing’s absence.

My seven-year-old niece once told me: “we don’t compare, because it doesn’t make anyone feel good,”  She’s right. At work, I’ve deposited monthly paychecks for people that equal my annual pay.  That comparison doesn’t make me happy.  Nor has the specter of starving children ever enhanced my enjoyment of a meal.

Basically, I think comparisons don’t make me feel good, because they highlight what seems to be the inherent lack of fairness in the universe. Not that the universe is intentionally unfair, it’s just that the dice shake out how they do.

Through my two cancer experiences, I experienced emotional and physical pain and I came to know a fair number of people with their own pain. On the other side now (as much as anyone reaches the other side) I am frequently–habitually–grateful for the absence of pain. I’m thankful for every test result that doesn’t predict more pain.  I’m incredibly thankful for my everyday life.  But at the same time — maybe because my work with cultivating gratitude has its roots in illness — I’m acutely aware that my state of blessed health has a random quality to it.  While I healed and my pain went away, others, equally deserving, did not heal. There are people who deal with chronic pain, who are suffering even as I am not suffering. I’m also aware that my own suffering can return at any unexpected moment.

I believe I’ve gotten pretty good at appreciating things great and small which makes me a generally a grateful person. But somehow I’ve also gotten in the habit of, in almost the same moment, considering the tenuous, ephemeral and random nature of whatever thing I’m appreciating, which adds a dollop of sadness onto my gratitude.

On one had I am grateful for, you know, life, because it’s amazing! But on the other hand, my friend is absolutely right: Nothing seems fair, because nothing is. And those are two pretty big and heavy concepts to lift at the same time.

 

Related articles

Scroll back up and click on that “Neuroplasticity” link. It’s a 2-minute video that’s interesting.

The book being discussed by our speaker was called Hardwiring Happiness.

The author did a TED talk.

You might be interested in this cliff’s Notes Version (actually About.com) of the Buddha’s views on suffering.

Here’s an article suggested by this widget that’s attached to my blog:

Passing

In February of 2003, a few months after my cancer diagnosis and surgery, I attended a cancer retreat in the Yarra Valley outside Melbourne, Australia.  It was an amazing ten days, that helped me transform my cancer experience into something that had value and meaning for me.  Part of what made the experience amazing were my four roommates. We were all under forty, among the youngest of the larger group.  We’d all experienced a life-threatening illness, and yet when we started talking at night, it could still seem like a slumber party! But while four of us were considered cancer-free after our surgeries and treatments,  that was not the case for Lisa.  She carried a burden greater than ours–the knowledge that cancer had already spread to her spine and her liver.  They’d already taken her uterus, and one arm was swollen with lymphedema.  She had endured many of the outcomes I most feared… and at the same time, she modeled for me how alive and vibrant a person could be even in the face of such feared outcomes.

Roomies at Gawler 2003Lisa (in the striped shirt) was not fearless, but she was fierce.  I saw her break down and cry at night, and I saw her wake in the morning newly determined to do everything in her power to live  more years–often citing her son, who was just a toddler at the time, and her daughter.  She did proud by her goals, surviving for a full decade since our time together.  Yesterday I woke to an email saying that she had died.

In my last post I talked about I’ve been struggling recently, to make decisions, to find meaning in the things that I do. Remembering Lisa is, for me, also about remembering perspective.  The worries I have currently are, in a way, a luxury. The kind of worries one has when one has health and the likelihood of a future. I am grateful for the time I have to figure things out, grateful for pain-free days, grateful for all the beautiful things and people in the world around me.  I’m grateful for the chance I have to try, again and again, to put experiences into words in a way that does them justice. In this moment, I am blessed.

Sibling Day

Oh, Sibling Day. This was the first year that, through the power of Facebook, I discovered  it existed, and it still passed before I knew when it was. It was yesterday. Do card companies make cards for this holiday? Answer unknown. According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia it is about 15 years old, and though not a federal holiday like Mother’s Day, has been embraced by 39 states.  Go marketing!

Though I’m not a great observer of nouveau holidays (I barely manage the traditional ones), I do really appreciate my siblings.  My full siblings (I also have two half siblings) are my connection to my parents, my childhood and my memories of where I’m from.  And because I won’t ever have biological children of my own, my sister’s children are the closest thing to my genetic legacy.

I feel particularly lucky that, at this juncture, we all live in the same city, even though that city is Los Angeles where it’s easy to let two to six months  go by without someone in person.  My sister tries to combat this with a standing dinner invite to her family’s house twice a month. Even with typical conflicts we usually manage to gather other once a month, hang out, see how much taller her kids have gotten.

About a month ago I also had a really special experience hanging out with my brother (and believe me, I would not use “special” in this way if it weren’t the most accurate term I could think of).  I hit him up to help me record some stuff I’d written.  I was going to read it myself, but after I tried it, it seemed better if the voice was male, so he did the reading as well as composing background music and producing the audio.

I seldom get to work my brother in the studio, but I love to, because it is the best time to see him deeply focused and, I think, happy.  I believe that being a musician and storyteller is his truest nature. (When he was only two or three, he used  to sing himself to sleep at night with long narrative songs about characters from TV shows he watched. I can remember listening, and even at the age of seven or eight noticing how music just poured from him.)

Though our training is really different, and our personalities are different,   my brother–my sibling–is the closest thing I could have to a male mirror of myself.  We have a similar sense of humor, which became clear as we edited the piece.  We also have a similar cadence and rhythm to our speech, so hearing him read my work felt oddly familiar.

I had brought in two poems and one piece of prose. At the end of our session, I felt like only one of the pieces worked–but I was really happy with that one piece.  I would post it here, but we submitted it for a contest, so I’ll wait until they announce the winners first (even though I’m pretty sure it would be safe to do so.  I’m fond of it, but it’s a pretty beginner-level poem, so I don’t think we are in big danger of winning). The whole experience made me think of how I’d like to collaborate with him more in the future.

In honor of that fact, his website is the first to be added to my “links I like.”  Soon to be followed by many more, but for tonight, because it’s late–just my sibling’s.  Happy Siblings Day!

Gratitude Post

 “You thank God for the good things that come to you, but you don’t thank him for the things that seem to you bad; that is where you go wrong.” –Ramana Marharshi

This quote has been in my mind lately, kind of flopping around in there like a fish

along with this other flopping fish– something Soygal Rinpoche said at a lecture I attended. He talked about how Tibetan monks who were held captive and tortured by the Chinese reported being grateful to their captors for providing the suffering that accelerated the monks’ journeys to enlightenment.

I think both the quote and the example are about the importance of working to make our experiences meaningful, even if things don’t happen the way we want them to.

So here’s a list of a few things I’m grateful for—randomly ordered,  except for the fact that every other item is something that I have to “work” to be grateful for—i.e. things that “seem to me bad.”

1(GOOD) I am grateful for my job and my new, part time work hours! Starting in the new year sometime, I will work from 10-3 each day, instead of 8:30-5. I’m hoping this will be very good for my morale and my writing productivity. I’m grateful to still have a job that offers a sense of security, and benefits.

 2 (BAD) I am grateful for genteel poverty. This helps me feel greater compassion for everyone who lives close to the edge everyday, and makes me want to reach out into the world and help, where and when I can. It makes me aware of the other kinds of support I have from family and friends, and it keeps us working to find success in our fields, when it might otherwise be easy to give up.

3) (GOOD) I am thankful for my family. My sister and brother-in-law open their home to my brother and Paul and myself every Sunday night, and their efforts have kept my siblings and their kids part of our lives, when life makes it so easy to let time pass and grow apart. And now my mom is visiting for two months, and I am thankful for that.

4) (BAD) I’m thankful for my cancer. Saying this feels a little loaded. I can’t be thankful for anyone else’s cancer, for radiation and chemo and suffering in general—but I have to be grateful to MY cancer. It taught me about myself, made me more open, strengthened my relationships with family and friends and was the conduit to other relationships. Because of cancer, I gained tools and knowledge that I think will help me for the rest of my life.

5) (GOOD) I’m grateful for Paul. Ten years into our marriage, he can still surprise me, delight me, infuriate me, and of course, make me laugh.

6) (BAD) I’m thankful for extra weight. I’ve lived my life lucky in this arena—but I think a day job at a desk and a night job at a desk have conspire with my changing metabolism, and now I have an extra ten pounds that feel extraneous—and I gotta say, the gratitude’s not exactly there yet. Perhaps I should be grateful for the help making decisions when I was cleaning out my closet — when things don’t fit, it is easier to let them go! Perhaps I can claim more compassion for others who have this struggle—although, in truth, I have known many people who have struggled with weight in different ways, and I have never doubted it is a difficult task. It could be that this outward evidence of my new metabolism will help me, in the coming months and years, to work with the ideas of aging, to work more with the pain and rewards of self-discipline, with want versus need and struggle versus acceptance. 

And I wonder about this too. I’m looking for “reasons” to be grateful, but maybe the goal is learning to being grateful without any reasons—either through faith that reasons are forthcoming, or maybe not even that. Maybe it’s just exercising our capacity to embrace whatever experience comes to us. Maybe, like the monks say, the things we struggle with most provide us with a path to enlightenment, and that’s reason enough to be grateful.