Radical Gratitude

Caroline Watkins
Caroline Watkins

I coined this term in my head after yoga yesterday- or so I thought. Feeling rather pleased with myself yet cautiously optimistic, I Googled it and lo and behold, it’s a book title for heaven’s sake. Yet as I read in an article, The Audacity of Imitation, by Jill Carattini, imitation really isn’t such a bad thing after all.

The expression fits nicely with yet another TED Talk I watched given by the Austrian-born Benedictine monk, David Steindl-Rast entitled, “Want To Be Happy? Be Grateful.”

I was introduced to Steindl-Rast when a client – a seller moving out of the area – encouraged me to subscribe to Gratefulness.org’s “Word for the Day.” It’s actually the only daily e-mail I receive by choice, aside from the Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alert to which I am woefully inattentive. Nevertheless, he suggests we are not grateful when we are happy. We are happy when we are grateful. He says that every moment is a given moment, a gift. And that “opportunity is the gift within every gift.”

This, in turn, caused me to reflect upon the opportunities of three men who spent a portion of their lives in prison: Joseph, son of Jacob (think coat of many colors), the apostle Paul and Nelson Mandela. In their own way they did not just tolerate their far less-than-ideal circumstances, they were radically grateful for them. They seized the opportunity to see that their circumstances served a greater purpose. It would seem this awareness was very much present during their trials and tribulations. For many of us, however, perspective comes in hind sight, if at all.

Oswald Chambers writes, “Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ.” C.S. Lewis echoes and expands on this thought in the following exquisite passage, “And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing…”

We do dredge up the past, don’t we . . . Sometimes looking so long at a closed door to happiness – to paraphrase Helen Keller – that we don’t see the one which has been opened for us.

Well, it seems we can alter our experience real-time- whether in or out of the muck and mire. I watched Stacy Kramer’s TED Talk: “The Best Gift I Ever Survived,” and she convincingly insists that her brain tumor was indeed a gift- one she would never wish on anyone but one that “recalibrated” what was most important in her life.

The same is true for me in a vastly different set of circumstances. By God’s grace I am starting to internalize gratitude for my experience – in its entirety – and genuinely frame it as part of a larger story – even a necessary one – and maybe, just maybe serving a greater purpose. And you know what? Happiness IS in direct proportion to gratitude.

Steindl-Rast argues that gratitude, in fact, can change the world. He offers, “If you are grateful, you are not fearful. If you are not fearful, you are not violent. If you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough, not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody.”

He continues that gratitude changes the “power pyramid” under which we live- whether in a country or in our own homes I would add. He launched the Network for Grateful Living and defines a network as the polar opposite of a pyramid. The concept of grateful living is so revolutionary, he concludes, that it changes the meaning of revolution, where in the traditional sense the “power pyramid” is turned upside down and different people end up doing the same oppressive things.

The Beatles, of course, sang about revolution…”You say you want a revolution…we all want to change the world.” Me, too I suppose. It’s hard for me, however, to think in those terms. I’d rather think in terms of micro revolution.

In recalling Mahatma Ghandi’s famous words to “be the change we wish to see in the world,” being grateful is a great place to start! It can have a surprising and powerful ripple effect on your children, spouse, co-worker, a cashier you next encounter or . . .  driver hogging the passing lane.

Choosing gratitude as your response – when appropriate – might even start a revolution, on whatever scale you’d like to think of it.

And that’s just radical.

– Caroline Watkins

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