“Oh wondrous creatures, by what strange miracle do you so often not smile.” Issa
In the dark season, when the world weighs heavy on your shoulders and the facts of life are so bad you can feel them in your gut, I suggest that you practice the gratitude game. My daughter and I play it when one of us is feeling out of sorts. It consists in simply thinking of all the reasons you have to be grateful. You can make up your own list, but please feel free to borrow some of ours. And please share with the readers of this newsletter some of your own reasons to be grateful. Many of them apply to everyone.
For instance, let us all give thanks for living in an Interglacial period. Getting caught in an ice age could ruin your whole day.
We also give thanks that so far today we have not been hit by any falling “space-junk.”
Looking back at history, many of us will feel deep gratitude for living in this place and time, on the fertile continent of Turtle Island, in this era of unprecedented freedom and abundance for many millions of people. Remember, just a few generations ago most of our ancestors were peasants, and they had almost no fun at all. Many of them had to sleep in the same room as their farm animals, and had to live without painkillers, Chinese food or Velcro. And consider that in just the past few hundred years we have nearly doubled the lifespan of the average human. So you now get twice as long to be you!
In the attitude of gratitude, we can give thanks for the tool-making genius of our species, which has created our new global brain into which I have plugged a bunch of my synapses.
I sometimes give thanks for my new mega-giga-pixilated-ap-loaded–ram-potent laptop computer and neo-cortex extender, even though I don’t have a clue how it all works, and even though I don’t think these devices will be good for our species in the long run.
We can find so many other reasons to have the attitude of gratitude. Dharma teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says we should give thanks to our toes. And we certainly can give thanks for the opposable thumb! Without it, just think how difficult it would be to button your pants. Or give a thumbs up! But of course, we now know the real reason for our opposable thumb, and that is the better to text with my dear.
We also feel gratitude for the more existential blessings. For instance, the Hubble telescope just sent back a picture of yet another galaxy, which contains 600 billion suns! And we got to know about that in our lifetime!
Even more worthy of our thanks are the astronomers who are now estimating, based on information from space probes and telescopes that there are over 35 thousand planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone that could support life. I consider that very “good” news, because it takes the pressure off of us earthlings. It means the universe is probably not just about us. We no longer have to carry the entire burden of meaning in the cosmos.
So relax. And as you settle into your seat, you might well give thanks for gravity – because right now all of us are hurling through space on this tiny rock, spinning around the earth’s axis at a thousand miles an hour, and orbiting the sun at 66 thousand miles an hour. And thanks to gravity, you don’t even have to hold on!
We can also give deep thanks for living in a time and place where all the world’s wisdom and cultures are available to us – so now I can practice Buddha’s blissful meditation in the morning, and then go out and listen to sweet music at night. Let me hear you say, “Om cha cha cha…ah hum.”
The list goes on and on, and friends, if you want to make your own – start it out by joining me in the attitude of gratitude – for this next breath. It is the mystery of life moving through you. We only get about 13 million breaths in a lifetime, and then maybe none at all for the rest of eternity, so dig this one. Go deep and taste it.