Gratitude

It is the Monday of my favorite holiday: Thanksgiving.

No tinsel or fireworks. No pomp and circumstance. Just family. And food.

Other holidays wear me out. I don’t think holidays should do that. They should restore. We should be able to relax. More often than not, pulling off a successful Christmas feels like more work than it does magic.

Thanksgiving puts the emphasis where most any good thing does: Thanksgiving is about people. Not just anybody. The people you are closest too.

Thanksgiving, in my opinion, also centers the nation in recovery’s greatest principle: gratitude.

It is everywhere in recovery circles: have an attitude of gratitude. 

I’m beginning to understand why.

By and large, life falls into two mentalities. We can either be grateful for it or take it for granted. Taking life for granted is dangerous business.

Use my sobriety as an example. If I begin to think that this sobriety thing is just something that happens, I lose the vigilance required to keep me sober. 

Or take my job. If I begin to see teaching as a paycheck rather than a calling, I might miss the opportunity to truly connect with a student who needs it.

It’s hard to practice gratitude when so much is taken for granted. 

Modern living has made humans expect so much. It used to be a lot to expect the train to run on time. Now we grow indignant if the train doesn’t have wi-fi capability. As we grow in our consumer expectations, we lose the simple acknowledgement that technology should make life easier. So why doesn’t it?

The stark proof of this paradox lies in the general state of anxiety that grips a larger percentage of the population by the year. Having a world connected to our fingertips is intended to make life easier. Instead, we carry with us a buzzing and beeping pressure cooker. 

It’s not 

oh great, I can engage with the world from anywhere

it’s 

because you can engage with the world anywhere, you better stay engaged with the world everywhere.

The more you think about it, the better sense it makes. Technology cannot uproot the fundamental requirements of the human condition. Whether you believe those requirements are imprinted in our bones by evolution or written in our souls by God, they are undeniably there. Namely, we want to discover answers, not have them recited for us by a talking robot.

Expecting more to be done for us than we are expected to do for ourselves is an equation for a miserable existence. This is all, of course, in my opinion. And I am not writing this post from some summit in the Himalayas. I love my phone. It makes life so much easier. It keeps me connected to the people I love, and introduces me to strangers who have changed my life.

My point is: why do I feel resentful and angsty when I have no internet to connect with? The phone becomes a traitor to my busy life. Don’t judge. I know you’ve cursed out Suri before too: Suri, you idiot! I asked if CVS was open–I don’t care about the US Open! When is the last time you thanked Suri, or Google, or Alexa, or whatever computer you talk with on a daily basis? We aren’t required to thank technology for what it does for us, yet we feel fully entitled to demand it always do a little more.

The idea for this post started in a traffic jam. 

Nothing like congestion to test the level of gratitude in your soul.

I drive my son back from play rehearsal past dinner time. I’m always impatient at anything that stands between me and my hunger. I had never experienced traffic at this particular intersection before. Up the hill, near the light, I realized why I was at a standstill: a car was in the right lane with its emergency lights on. Everyone had to merge at the last minute to avoid getting stuck behind it.

I let my horn rip, of course, as I made an aggressive and rash maneuver to try and catch the light. I wasn’t alone. Other drivers were seething at this one driver whose car caused a five minute delay.

Have you ever had similar road rage?

That evening, I expected things to go according to the rules of the road. It wasn’t until I drove further on that I even considered stopping and seeing what was wrong. Why was the car pulled over? Did the battery die? Could I have given it a jump? Whatever inconvenience I experienced by watching a few red lights pass, what dire scenario might the driver of that other car be facing? And, when you get down to it, isn’t that what really matters? Wouldn’t it be a far far greater thing to help a fellow human on the side of the road than be indignant about waiting an extra five minutes to eat my dinner?

There is a new expectation we have when driving.

There are so many roadside apps and geo-positional services that we expect people, even in emergencies, to be able to take care of themselves. Shame on us. Shame on me.

Somewhere along the line I clearly lost gratitude that my car takes me wherever I want to go—and takes me there fast. What an incredible convenience that is.

Practicing gratitude is not contingent on having a lot or a little. 

It is just what it says: a practice. 

It is not the thought that counts. Not in my experience. I’m not sharing the regret I had in not helping the driver on the side of the road so I can feel better about doing the wrong thing. I share that story as a sort of prayer, in hopes that the next time I drive by someone in distress, I stop to help.

So here’s to your gratitude feast. I pray we all, as a society, take careful stock of all we have to be thankful for.