Giving Thanks. M. J. Ryan
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having.
—Henry Miller
A perennial dieting tip is to eat something and then wait twenty minutes before
deciding to eat something again. The reason is that your body needs that much
time to register that it is full. If you keep eating without pausing, you will not
realize that your body is full, and therefore you may overeat.
Giving thanks for what we have in our lives is like that pause when eating. It
allows us to feel full, to register on the emotional and spiritual level that we have,
in fact, been given “enough.” If we don’t practice gratitude on a daily basis, it’s
easy to overconsume, to feel a lack and to try to fill that lack through possessions,
because on a psychological level we haven’t registered that we already have what
we need.
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That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
—Emily Dickinson
Last night I watched my daughter Ana, whom we recently adopted from China,
lie on the bed in an ecstatic trance of bottle sucking. Her eyes closed, her rosebud
mouth pursed, her exquisitely long fingers curled around the plastic bottle, she
gave herself over to the experience. She wasn’t obsessing on past wounds,
although perhaps she had a right to. Neglected for over a year, when we got her
she had been covered with second-degree burns on her buttocks from lying in
urine. Nor was she worrying about where the future bottles might come from,
although she had a right to do that also. Abandoned on Christmas evening on
a cold street until someone heard her newborn cries, she had been fed only
watered down milk and seemed to be starving the first few weeks we fed her.
Rather, she was so focused on appreciating the warm milk as it went down
her throat that everything else, past and future, simply disappeared. As I looked at
her, I realized that this total and complete absorption in the present moment is
available to us all when we choose to let gratitude wash over us uninhibitedly.
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Realize deeply that the present moment is all you really have.
—Eckhart Tolle
As I allow myself to open to the fullness of gratitude, the past and future do fade
away, and I become more alive in the present moment. That’s because gratitude
is, for the most part, about the here and now. While we can be thankful for past
blessings and hope for future ones, when we experience a sense of gratefulness,
we are usually contemplating some present circumstance. We are brought up to
date with ourselves, so to speak. Our focus moves away from all that we or others
did or failed to do in the past, or what we hope for or worry about in the future,
and we find ourselves placed squarely in this precious moment, this experience
that will never happen again.
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The most invisible creators I know of are those artists whose medium is life itself.
The ones who express the inexpressible—without brush, hammer, clay or guitar.
They neither paint nor sculpt—their medium is their being. Whatever their presence
touches has increased life. They see and don’t have to draw. They are the
artists of being alive.
—J. Stone
I spent several Christmases recently with a family that loves to give presents. Every
year, the floor around the tree was heaped with hundreds of gifts, so many that it
took the entire morning to open them all. But despite all that was given and
received, I would leave there every year feeling empty and alone. There had been
a plethora of presents, but no presence. This family gave so many gifts because
they didn’t know how to connect deeply to themselves and one another. And they
ripped through the mounds of merchandise, saying a pro forma “Thank you,” but
with no sense of true appreciation being expressed or received.
The experience was so powerful—the contrast between the material plenty
and the emotional lack—that it set me to thinking. That’s when I realized that
you can’t experience gratitude with a heart that’s closed. It’s just not possible.
That’s because gratefulness is only experienced in the moments in which we
open our hearts to life—to the beauty in this moment, to the possibility of
surprise in the next.
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Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
—Jacques Maritain
A person does something kind for you, it could even be a very small thing, say
holding a door open for you. When you say, “Thank you,” and really mean it, rather
than saying it out of social convention, your heart instinctively opens to the per-
son. In that moment, you experience your connection to each other, even if you
never lay eyes on each other again.
This openheartedness takes courage. It requires enough trust in the good-
ness of other people and the universe at large that we can put aside our self-
protectiveness—that stance that says I am not going to be grateful for what I
am receiving right now because it’s too scary to risk getting hurt—and take a
leap of faith to acknowledge that we have received a gift.
The fact that true gratitude creates a sense of openheartedness is the reason
so much of the “thanks” in this culture is rote and unfeeling. People are afraid to
feel thankful, because they are afraid of the out-of-control experience that occurs
when they acknowledge the bond between giver and receiver. We are afraid to
feel the love that gets created any time we express true thanks. As adults, our
hearts have been broken many times and, by golly, we want to make sure it
doesn’t happen again.
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The choice is ours, in every moment. Do we want to live in seeming safety,
shut inside the shell of our individuality, unwilling to experience the deep and
abiding connections that are ours in any case, or are we willing to risk, over and
over, having our hearts broken open to the beauty and the pain of all that is ours
to experience?
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Whatever we are waiting for—peace of mind, contentment, grace, the inner aware-
ness of simple abundance—it will surely come to us, but only when we are ready