Gratitude is the Attitude

A few years back a dear friend and I were in Sedona, Arizona having breakfast while on a long road trip. I was going through a difficult period in my life and she asked me, smiling, how I interface with the Cosmic, the Divine, and in what ways I communicate with the larger Life that surrounds me. I replied, “Well, each morning I ask that I be happy, healthy and free, that others be peaceful and liberated, that good things come to me and those I love,” and continued to recite a list of requests or prayers that I used to start my day with. She looked at me and (now not smiling) simply replied, “Do you ever just say thank you?”

The simple question she asked me now pops up in my heart almost once a day and gives me a moment to pause, take a breath, and simply say “Thank You” for what I am, for this life that I have been given. I now begin each day with a simple “Thank you,” right upon waking, even if I feel crummy.  In truth I could have been born a million different people, in a million different places, and yet here I am, writing this blog, warm in a comfortable home on a brisk fall day. Not that many of my brothers and sisters around the world can say that. And yet they too have their own myriad things to be grateful for.

One of the quickest ways to finding a more lasting and stable sense of joy in the day-to-day is to foster gratitude and an attitude of appreciation for ourselves and the outside world that constantly nurtures us. Sometimes we have to fake it-but something about the words “Thank you” (see Masaru Emoto’s “The Message From Water) does something to shift that crumminess, even if it’s almost unnoticeable.

When we tell our partner that we love them, really we’re saying “I am so grateful for you being here, in my life, dearest.” When the sun shines after four days of clouds and we smile upon waking up to the bright blue sky, whether we hear the words in our minds or not, we are saying “Thank you for shining again, dear sun.” It’s not that sun stops shining, it’s that the clouds cover it over (the depth of this realization is limitless and certainly worth another blog, to come soon). In another sense, we are also thanking the clouds for moving on, further east, and releasing the source of our life (and often enough, joy) back to us. So perhaps there’s an opportunity on a cloudy day to thank the clouds for the future time when they will eventually pass (as all things do), as we will feel that sunshine even more poignantly.

When we eat good food and taste that magical first bite, closing our eyes, humming “Mmm” to ourselves, salivating ecstatically, really that is an expression of gratitude not only for the fact that we have to eat to live, but for the delicious mouthful itself. But to discern even more deeply, we are in that “Mmm” thanking the preparer of the food, the pots and pans and knives that transformed it, the dishwasher (if we’re at a restaurant) that will clean up after us, the supplier and the one who delivered it from the farm, the farmer who spent the hard hours in the garden, the earth for nurturing the seed and the rain for watering the soil, the sun for providing light and warmth, and so on back through the lineages of farmers that have preserved the seeds (and though I don’t like to admit it, even Monsanto is a part of this Great Chain of Being, to use Ken Wilber’s term) and the knowledge of how to grow the food.

Very quickly, through that one bite, we are eating the whole of Life itself, regardless of whether it is an organic avocado or a twinkie, and if we spend enough time on that mouthful, even the Big Bang itself will become apparent, and gratitude will bloom. This is a great practice to help foster interconnectedness, as nothing exists without the full support of everything else, and it is only in the conceptual mind that we separate things into names and ideas and forms.

Now what is even more miraculous is that this morsel will disappear and become something else, for us energy and waste matter, just as all those things that went into its creation as the perfect bite of food have become a part of us and our bodies. And in this we find the true essence of Transience and Interconnectedness. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen monk, sometimes uses an analogy of this sort and if this type of mindful eating is practiced with diligence, it can awaken something truly beautiful inside us and begin to dissolve our sense of separation from everything around us.

So this is my recommendation for Thanksgiving, which began as a religious holiday, essentially to give thanks to the Divine for a successful harvest season and for life itself (which is absolutely dependent upon the growers of food, thank you farmers!). This Thursday, before you take your first bite of turkey or tofurkey, cranberry or kraut, say a word of thanks in whatever way seems best to you for the chef or for the farmer, for the sun or the earth itself, before putting it in your mouth. Then with each bite, close your eyes and see if you can discover in its flavors the rain, the soil, the trees that give shade, the farmers, your ancestors and the incredible complexity of the natural processes that turn seeds into trees and young into old, and just say “Thank You” for all of it. We can nurture this attitude day in and day out with a little practice, until everything we see and do is one big movement of gratitude; and that can help to build a lasting sense of connectedness and at-homeness in the world and in our bodies.

Barbu Panaitescu, Events Coordination ( http://barbupanaitescu.wordpress.com/)