Gratitude for Mixed Blessings

   With Thanksgiving being tomorrow, I’ve been thinking about gratitude. I’ve overheard many snippets of conversation recently about gratitude for things that are easy to be grateful for: warm place to live, car that works, etc. Gratitude is easy when we feel grateful. It’s easy to feel grateful for things we’ve decided are “good.”

    But what about the times when you don’t feel grateful? Where does gratitude come in when you’re confronted with a mixed blessing or a small disaster?

    Really, there is no such thing as an unmixed blessing. We live on a dualistic planet.  Everything here has at least two sides. Every blessing comes with a shadow.  

    Sometimes we don’t see the shadow in the blessing. Other times we don’t see the blessing in the shadow. And sometimes the blessing is the shadow. These moments, when I least likely to feel grateful, are the ones where I most need to dredge up some gratitude.

    Fortunately gratitude is much more than an emotion. The experience of feeling grateful is fleeting. Like any other emotion, it passes. The feeling is often triggered by an external event. It’s not something I can reliably create or control.

    The practice of gratitude is both sustainable and a choice I have the power to make. Practicing gratitude doesn’t necessarily make me feel grateful. Often it doesn’t change how I feel at all. It does create a space for me to decide who I want to be.

    On a personality level, we don’t have much choice about a lot of what happens in our lives. It’s a big world. Shit happens. We can choose who we want to be in relation to what’s happening.

    Even in the “this sucks” moments, I have that choice. Shifting who I am in relation to what’s happening begins with dredging up some gratitude. This practice doesn’t magically create a new emotion I can use to squash the pain and/or fear I’m feeling.  It does give me a bit of balance.

    When I’m in that “this sucks” place, my mind spins with “what ifs” fueled by my inability to see how the situation could possibly come out okay. The catastrophe factory in my head starts working overtime. I can go from this moment to being homeless and pushing a shopping cart down the street talking to myself in three seconds.

    Practicing gratitude interrupts this cycle by interjecting a new possibility. It reminds me that something else is possible. Whether or not I can tangibly identify that something is irrelevant. Remembering that something else is possible lets me move out of giving all my energy to the catastrophe factory.

    The tool I use most often to dredge up some gratitude is making a gratitude list. I have to dig to make the list. Grabbing the obvious stuff, like “I’m grateful I’m alive”, doesn’t work. I have to find something that engages me and demands presence. I have to find gratitude for mixed blessings and open myself to possibility that what looks like a disaster might be a blessing. Here are a few mixed blessings that I've put on my gratitude list recently: 

1. I am grateful the world is not as black and white as I sometimes wish it was. 
2. I am grateful the Universe is smarter than I am. 
3. I am grateful for knowing how to sit still and be present when I'm uncomfortable. 
4. I am grateful that what things look like right now is not necessarily how they'll look tomorrow. 

    Another gratitude practice I engage in regularly is saying "thank you." It's a small action that helps me not take things for granted. I thank grocery store clerks, wait staff and the barrista at my favorite coffee shop. Yes, they're just doing their jobs and I appreciate it. I thank my friends. I thank strangers. When I'm not sure who to thank, I thank the Universe. The challenge comes in remembering say "thank you" for the opportunities that show up looking like big messes.
 

Redefining Peace

      I spent several years, from my mid-teens to my late twenties, protesting. I walked in the Nuclear Freeze in Chicago in 1984. I helped build and lived in a shanty town as part of the Free South Africa Coalition. A friend and I snuck a banner into the IU law school commencement address to protest William Rhenquists appointment to the Supreme Court. That one almost got me kicked out of college. I've hung fliers, handed out leaflets, made speeches and had a near miss with being arrested.
    I don't do any of those things anymore. It's not that I don't care, but I don't like what being a part of that creates in me. The more deeply involved I get with a cause the more I lose the ability to understand how anyone else could believe differently and the more upset I feel at what's going on.....and I become just as intolerant and angry as the people who hold whatever belief I'm protesting.
      Raging for peace does not work for me...neither does looking outside myself for things that are an inside job. I cannot expect the world to hold a peace that I often struggle to create in myself.
    I have seen my snarl on the faces of others holding peace signs. I have heard my anger in the voices of friends and strangers when they talk about current wars and their desire for peace. But what do they really mean by "peace"?
   Many of them seem to be talking about an idyllic world where no one fights about anything, there is no violence and all aggression has been supplanted by love. It's a beautiful fantasy, but not one I'm willing to give much energy to even though I understand how we got here. We are living in world that seems filled with violence, anger, aggression and power over. The human tendency is to go from one extreme to the other in order to find the middle. So many of us respond to the violence we see in the world by fleeing into a comforting daydream of peace.
   But isn't this the same old either/or dichotomy that created the lack of peace in the first place? When we put two things in an either/or model, we set them against each other and they are in conflict. Peace vs. war sets up a conflict where peace is at war with war.
  When I hear people talk about a peace that involves purging ourselves of every aggressive impulse two things jump out at me: a) if we get there, we'll be extinct and b) we've lost touch with how we came into this world.
    If our ancestors had succeeded in purging themselves of aggression they wouldn't have survived. They needed aggression to kill the predators who wanted to eat them and to hunt for food. We may not be living in a situation where we need those instincts to surface in the same way. However every time we stand up for ourselves and set boundaries, we are relying on a different aspect of the same instinct.
     Aggression, violence and anger are as innately a part of the human species as love, joy and compassion. Our entrance into this world comes in an explosion of beauty and violence. Even if your mother birthed you surrounded by loving family and friends, she was probably yelling and swearing because birth is not gentle. And after spending nine months breathing water in a protected environment, you were ejected into a world of rampant noise expected to breathe something different right now or die. 
     If a world at peace is a world devoid of all internal and external conflicts, what happens to our creativity? What happens to music, art and poetry? Art that touches us deeply is birthed from conflict. It is an offering made from dancing with tension, from wrestling the core of conflict until it is made visible.
     What would happen to us in that idyllic world?  Physiologically, stress pushes us to step out of our comfort zone and make changes. Without the stress of internal conflict, what impetus would we have to evolve and grow?
    For human beings, recognition is based on differences. We know the water in the shower is hot because we’ve felt cold water.  We know what feeling peaceful is because we’ve experienced conflict.  If peace was the only experience we had, we’d cease to recognize it and it would lose any meaning for us.
    The idyllic descriptions I’ve heard of a peaceful world remind me of what I was taught about heaven in Sunday school. Heaven was all lounging around in bliss, harps and holy beings. Even as a kid, I thought heaven sounded boring. I still think I’d be terminally bored in a completely peaceful world.
     I’m not sure what my personal definition of peace is. I know it’s an inside job that can radiate out into the larger world.  I do believe peace is inclusive; doesn’t depend on repression or wiping anything out. It is expansive enough to include aggression and conflict and moving through them both to a temporary still point, which will unravel again.  I have a hard time imagining nations at war if those nations were filled with people who made space for the movement of their own aggression rather than externalizing it.




  

The Art of Falling Apart

I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to recently who are unsettled, restless, not sleeping and vaguely uneasy in a way they can't pinpoint. Yes, yes, yes! We are living in strange times of intense transition, both personally and transpersonally. There is an enormous wrestling match, combative dance, tug-of-war going on between the old paradigm and the new.
   The old paradigm is ruled based, hierarchical, all about survival of the fittest and invested in "fact" and what can be proved. The new paradigm is more about consensus, shared welfare, intuition and how each of our unique strengths make a more fluid and stronger whole when they are allowed to flourish.
   We see this clash in the news every day. In the same week several states chose to acknowledge same sex marriage while others work to pass archaic abortion laws. Microcosm - macrocosm. While this struggle plays out in the world around us, it also plays out in us. We are ALL, collectively and individually, in transition. Old pockets of internal conflict and the places where we are incongruent with ourselves are coming to the surface...and demanding attention.
    The old paradigm says there are rules to fall back on. Confusion is a form of weakness. We just need to make a decision and get on with it. The new paradigm invites us to stay with the process and questions the relationship between push and allow.
    Initially I looked at what is surfacing in my life as individual issues that I needed to work on. But from one day to the next, the issue seemed to change. One day my restlessness was connected to one thing. The next day I my uneasiness seemed tied to something else entirely. So what do I focus on? To add to the confusion, these shifts weren't connected to any external event.  They were fueled by some change in my internal landscape.
   I had a vague sense that these individual issues were all pieces of something larger, but what? One of my responses to feeling unsettled and confused was the desire to exert control over small things just because I could. Okay. Normal human response to chaos. Not a big deal unless I find myself trying to force outcomes on a bigger scale.
Then one night I watched an amazing documentary called Wake Up. At the end of the film, in reference to the main characters struggle, someone remarks that  he'll be okay because he falls apart well. Oh.....
   The disconnect isn't about wanting to control the small stuff. It's about wanting to use the illusion of control to avoid the unknown. We are all in transition. Transition involves rebuilding and recreating but that can only happen after coming apart. The individual issues that are surfacing are asking us to pay attention to the unknown, to stay with the falling apart.
   If we give in to the urge to control or "fix" something just because we can, we risk building on the foundation of the old that is still coming unwound. We risk cementing something that really doesn't serve us anymore just because it's more comfortable to have some solidity.
   Until I watched that documentary, it hadn't occurred to me that falling apart was a skill.  In this time of intense transition, we are being invited to hone our skills at coming unwound....to live the art of falling apart.