Gratitude can be a simple thing. Many of us grew up with the daily dinnertime kickoff ritual of thankyouLordforwhatwe’reaboutoreceiveamen or one of its many variations, at least those of us raised in the Christian tradition. Whether other families thanked Allah or Yahweh or the Great Spirit at mealtime is beyond this writer’s cultural knowledge, though if he were to revive this tradition at some point in his own life he’d consider a more lively and modern reference for the Almighty, something like “Big Bangster, which has kind of a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Gratitude can also be much more than about food, of course, something grander, a state of consciousness and a powerful upbeat approach to living, at least in some circles. In the caring profession of mental health practice, gratitude has morphed into a useful therapeutic tool, something traditional religions may have always known, but the fact is we now live in a secular age, and a very troubled one, at that. Depression and anxiety run rampant like they never did before, or so the media and social research tell us, and isn’t it time somebody did something about it?
It should come as no surprise that Positive Psychology has become an official academic endeavor, gratitude the fodder of studies and research papers. They’ve expanded the practice far beyond the simple prayerful “thank you” for life’s offerings into the mindful process of turning what little you have into abundance, where the proper deployment of gratitude can change your whole outlook on life and the world. At one of their websites you can download three Gratitude Exercises for free, and of course there are YouTube Gratitude Videos, as well. Call it a scientific approach to doing God’s (or the Big Banger’s) Work, where getting beyond the confines of the personal, and gaining a bigger perspective on the world and one’s place in it, might just lead to greater peace of mind, if not higher wisdom about what matters in life. There’s no harm in that, is there?
As children we’re told by our mothers and other wiser adults to “count our blessings,” as Perry Como sang it back in the ‘50s. Perry offered the clever suggestion of counting your blessings instead of sheep as a cure for insomnia. My parents had it on vinyl, though it’s not clear anybody in our family ever took Perry’s advice. The blessing count, as an enhancement to well-being, is a brilliantly simple concept, no matter how simply or elaborately it is practiced. It is also one that many find difficult to employ effectively, for all too often the comforting insight endures but briefly, only to get swept away by the hubbub of living. Children mystified by the whole gratitude thing and bored with the mealtime ritual may at some point start to notice that a lot of adults have this same difficulty. Gratitude and its supposed benefits can be a slippery thing, and many don’t seem to get it, at all. It’s no wonder insomnia is the plague of the modern age.
It’s also a fact that in our consumer society, created needs make the world go ‘round and keep the all-important GDP on the upswing. Gratitude for what one has presents a real danger to this dynamic, making Positive Psychology almost unpatriotic, if not heretical. In this world The Church of Never Enough Stuff prevails, despite the warnings that’ve been handed down by the wise since antiquity, from philosophers both secular and holy. No one should find any of this unfamiliar; wisdom and philosophy have rarely had much appeal to politicians or economists, and the generally sad state of the world reflects this, or so some of us suspect. Where are Plato’s philosopher-kings when we need them (which has been always)?
But enough lamentation about the state of the world. Gratitude at its most elemental level begins and ends with physical well-being, hands down. “Nothing matters if you don’t have your health” seems so obvious as to be ludicrous, but just as ludicrous (and pathetic and perplexing) is the fact that the healthy tend to take this blessing totally for granted, right up to the moment when their body starts to fail in some way that they cannot ignore, often in the rudest and most unexpected of ways. Or maybe I’m only speaking for myself. Call it the Catastrophic School of Enlightenment, for many of us the most direct way to higher wisdom. One is never prepared for these marvelous enlightenment opportunities; successfully negotiating them is often the path towards higher gratitude.
Whoever said that “youth is wasted on the young” must’ve had this foremost in mind. A corollary is “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” and that bit of wisdom was common knowledge long before Joni Mitchell sang to us about paradise and parking lots. One wonders if Joni’s pondered that line since suffering (and surviving) a brain aneurysm a few years back. One would guess the her slow but steady and quite remarkable recovery would seem to derive at least some of its energy out of thanks for just being alive. The logic of gratitude can be simple and straightforward and in the end quite powerful in such circumstances.
Ravinginbeantown gave this topic the once over a few years back with The eyes have it/ Oh say can you see? that can be found under General thoughts elsewhere on this site. That one was about how twenty years of living with glaucoma, after some very dodgy (not to say traumatic) moments in the beginning, has made this writer grateful in the deepest way for the gift of sight. It made note of how much we take for granted in this life, especially the luckiest among us, this writer included, whose lives have been blessed by the absence of terrible hardship or loss or deprivationor any of the million kinds of awfulness and hardship other lives unlike ours confront every day, and how it has always been thus.
You know the list. It includes poverty, violence, social and political upheaval, terror and abuse, to name but a few. And of course health disasters, some of which might begin in the womb or early childhood and can dominate an entire life, and even then only if the victim remains alive. There are also the stories of the “victims” who live their lives as anything but that, heroes (often surrounded by other heroes in their support) who don’t succumb, but fight to create some semblance of a “normal” life for themselves. Such stories have always been around. We’ve always needed stories about heroes.
Seen in that light, getting a taste of health trauma at the age of fifty would seem like a small matter, unless you happen to be the party facing the possibility of losing your sight long before (you boldly assume) your time is up. That earlier posting was a reflection and a celebration of sorts, as twenty years later the ophthalmologist can point to a scan of the left eye and rave “see that? the optic nerve is still perfect.” Of course, the less said about the right eye the better, and the lesson in gratitude there is that it could have been worse.
Despite this success, the power of trauma left a legacy of anxiety that precedes every ophthalmology appointment to this day, despite years of stability. The flip side of this was acknowledgement that this had been the only serious medical issue to arise over a long life, which could be described as gratitude of a sort. Well, not exactly the only such issue. There had also been the small matter of high blood pressure that had preceded the vision catastrophe by ten years. And as seems to be the case with these pressure matters, it had also never presented any noticeable symptoms; medical science in both cases had been crucial in pointing it out.
High blood pressure, in case you’ve really not been paying attention to public service announcements on the radio or ever had a medical checkup where BP is one of the basic “vital signs” they always measure, ruins and/or ends lives every day in this world. Stroke, heart attack – all really bad. There are lifestyle causes and genetic causes and it doesn’t matter. If you have it and don’t get it treated you will sooner or later “become a statistic,” so to speak, and the statistics include lots of people who do exactly that.
In my own personal blood pressure story, faith in the medical system had been a comfort for thirty years. Have regular medical checkups and get with the program, have confidence in preserving that precious “normal” life that one has always taken for granted. Not a whole lot of gratitude there, not really. The dutiful elevated BP patient sooner or later gets their own cuff setup and checks it at home, especially prior to regular medical checkups. Over thirty years there are literally ups and downs – it’s all in the numbers, which with BP change constantly. What matters is the trend. With aging, this usually means forever upwards over time.
No problem! The doc, whom you trust implicitly, will change the meds as necessary, just keep checking those numbers now and then, report anything drastic. Not to bore you with numbers you should probably already know, but 120 systolic “over” 80 diastolic is the gold standard. If you love biology and need to know more, ask your doctor or visit the internet; in the end it’s academic. Just believe in the numbers and you’ll be okay.
Another aspect of this blessed life was that nothing drastic ever turned up, lots of 130s and 140s over lots of 80s through the years, with maybe the occasional 160. Not quite the gold standard but if the doc says it’s okay and changes the meds as necessary to bring it down again, bad news never arrives. Call it a qualified success with no disasters over thirty years, and does anything else matter?
Paralleling the glaucoma script, when ominous changes unexpectedly showed up, there were no symptoms, no sign whatever of imminent disaster. The captain of the Titanic knew there were icebergs out there, but he was wary, on an “unsinkable” vessel. And we all know what happened there, don’t we? Haven’t we all seen the movie? So one fine day to see 220/110 just had to be a fluke, right? Faulty equipment? Conveniently I had a scheduled medical appointment the next day. Inconveniently the good doctor got the same reading, got all serious about how disaster might or might not be imminent (such a comfort, that) but how at any rate drastic steps were necessary. He immediately produced a new med (to be taken RIGHT NOW) and scheduled an emergency cardiology appointment STAT, which is a doctor’s way of saying it was a big deal. He considered an ambulance but settled for an escorted car ride with family, so not as STAT as it could have been, merely almost.
The cardiologist played cool, as well, took lots of BP readings, took some blood tests, kept watch for a few hours, and sent me home with the marvelous new medication, to be added to the three already in the regimen. If that sounds like a lot of medication for a single medical issue, rest assured it is. But crisis averted! No stroke, no heart attack, no sudden ending of normalcy. Bullet dodged! Was it a moment flooded with gratitude? Yes, though the lack of real drama – no symptoms, don’t forget, just a lot of numbers and talk – made it all kind of subdued.
But life can be funny. Sometimes it can seem like when it hasn’t made its point clearly enough, it doubles down. This happened one week later, when out of the blue – still no symptoms! – things got strange and dramatic and totally new in a way that hardly seemed real. It started with fainting dead away over lunch, and not due to the Chinese dumplings, either. After regaining consciousness, the conviction was that it was only necessary to lie down for a minute, until I realized I could not stand up without help, which was not only novel but rather unnerving. But the weirdness of it all transcended any moments of fear.
Disbelief was the operative state of mind, as the EMTs and the fire department showed up, all of them really nice guys, calm cool and collected and glad they could talk to me instead of zapping me with their defibrillator. Getting carried down the stairs in a chair was kind of embarrassing – were the neighbors watching? – followed by an ambulance ride – wow, this is me, riding in an ambulance! – did not sink in as a real experience, as in “that’s not really an iceberg we just hit, was it?” Having an emergency room medical team fuss over you, fainting again and not even knowing it, was something straight out of TV, and I don’t even watch those shows.
Following all that excitement, five days as an inpatient, with the first night in an ICU, was almost anticlimactic. This was all being taken very seriously by everybody but myself, which was a bit unnerving. Three quarters of a century on this earth without a hospital stay can make one overconfident, it seems. In the end, it had all been about overmedication, with the beta blocker the culprit, though of course this was realized after the fact. It took five days to figure it all out, and except for some occasional lightheadedness, there were still no symptoms to speak of. The passionate debate on the cardiac team was about going for a pacemaker or not, and in the end the “nays” prevailed, following a treadmill session that evidently proved their point. For a 75 year old heart, they told me mine was holding up well, and to keep riding that bike.
Another bullet dodged, only this time the bullet had not been about avoiding blindness – this one could’ve been fatal, or at least something terrible. So where’s the gratitude? It’s there, multilayered and directed towards many things. For one thing, I was the only ambulatory patient on that cardiac floor. Here I was, walking around dragging this monitor (I called it my “ball and chain”; the nurses laughed), taking pictures to pass the time. The view up there was spectacular and strange, depending on which window you chose. An inpatient hospital floor has a kind of space ship quality, and the gratitude meter registered when it hit me how for some if not many patients, it was a place that was totally familiar. None of them on my floor ever left their rooms, if they even got out of bed. I was grateful I was not them.
Television fare in a hospital borders on dreadful, so nothing beats a good book, especially if it’s a real pageturner, which in this case was Gone with the Wind. Ever heard of it? I’d already started it when this real life episode had burst forth out of nowhere, and with God knows how many hours to kill, it was perfect. Chances are you know the story, might’ve read the incredibly long book or seen the very long movie, or at least know Clark Gable was Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh was Scarlett O’Hara and he said “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” on the big screen back in 1939. Never mind what that was about but what matters is that it’s all about the South losing the Civil War, and focuses on the lives of the once fabulously wealthy plantation owners who’d lost it all. An entire American Dream existence – the houses, the servants, the parties and endless leisure – gone to hell in a scant few years.
Margaret Mitchell’s novel, like any grand historical yarn, can inspire any number of different responses. But reading it up there in that hospital room, wearing that scanty hospital gown with an IV in each arm, what I noticed was how many of the characters in the story were obsessed about what they’d lost and would never get back, to the exclusion of everything else. It seemed that for them, life was not worth living if you couldn’t be on top in the most fabulous way, a life they’d taken for granted. Missing was any gratitude that they were still alive (and many had died), that they could and would rebuild somehow, that they’d had a mighty good run, while it had lasted.
Ashley Wilkes is the poster child for this attitude, obsessed with romantic memories of a grand and chivalrous and noble era, unblemished by any thoughts about what had been some ugly realities. It goes without saying, even though the author of Gone with the Wind never said it, that it had all been based on the most hideous kind of human slavery. Aside from the moral implications, slavery was also fast becoming an obsolete and doomed economic institution in the 19th century, with no real future. Ashley and his kind lived in total denial of the cold reality of this, at least according to Margaret Mitchell. The South’s hatred for the “damn Yankees” never acknowledges how much their grand scheme had been aided and abetted by unfortunate US cultural norms that had been central to its national origins a century before.
Scarlett and Rhett, survivors with purpose, get top billing partly for being the misfits that they were, never giving in to the hopeless and beaten status quo they resisted. Part of that prevailing gloom was an obsession over how you could have it all and lose it in what seemed like an instant, gone with the wind. It made me think about my own glorious life, not quite the life of an antebellum Southern planter, but glorious in its own way when all is said and done. And it seemed very real, up on that science fiction medical floor, that I’d come seriously close to losing everything, just like that. And there had been no symptoms. On the other hand, Ashley and the gang should have seen it coming. Margaret Mitchell gives us Rhett Butler to eloquently hammer this point home, to the consternation of all the loyal Confederates, itching for a war they could not win.
Of course, Ms. Mitchell brings Rhett low with his own intense tragic loss by the end, which is not, in fact, quite the end. By then, Rhett is returning to his roots in S Carolina to rebuild his life after famously and damnlessly parting ways with Scarlett. For her part, she tells us “tomorrow is another day,” on the face of it a trite cliché but it is the essence of Scarlett, who for all her faults remains forever undaunted.
Joni Mitchell, for her part, has made a comeback of sorts, unafraid to face her fans with the reality that she is the same genius they’ve always known but hardly the onstage phenomenon she once was, or perhaps another phenomenon altogether, courageous in many ways. As for me, life goes on as before with occasional exciting new side effects, courtesy of the drugs that will prevent the disaster that almost happened, but didn’t. It’s a great feeling, though life can be a dizzying experience at times.
Does gratitude have a place, here? The funny thing is how gratitude comes and goes, gets considered in moments and then fades from thought. One can certainly make an effort to keep it in mind on a daily basis or as a spiritual practice. Hey! Whatever works for you! For some of us the most basic “practice” is to be grateful for every new day, and to be thankful for any second chances life may have offered us, courtesy of the Big Bangster or whatever higher power in which we may believe, or even if we believe there’s no higher power in our universe, at all.
