The miracle of gratitude

Gratitude.

Start small: breath, water, shelter, food, sleep, mobility, and still having our wits. Start with clothing, resources, and the nameless, faceless community around us that keeps the lights on, paves the roads, educates the children, and provides emergency services. These things are so easily overlooked. These things are essential.

Start with the senses: the vibrancy of the color red, the sight of geese flying in formation against a blue sky, the smell of bread that wafts out of the corner bakery. The first sip of coffee in the morning. Start with the luxury of a warm shower, the comfort of a soft blanket, and the never-ending delight of petting the trusting head of a friendly dog. Start with noticing how late afternoon sunlight dances on water, or how just one song from you mood-lifter playlist (if you don’t have one, make one immediately) offers a shaft of light on a bleak day. These things are easily dismissed. These things matter.

Start with love: the love that brought you into this world, the faces of the people who love you today and those who have loved you at all stages of your life. Start with the love you have for four-footed companions and two-footed friends, family, and partners. Start with the love you have for those who are no longer in your life. Start with the love you bring to all you do, the quiet courtesies others offer and the graciousness you give in return. These things are easily forgotten. These things make life worth living.

We’ve been given these gifts. And as if they aren’t enough, we’ve also been given the beauty of music, the ability to play it, and the opportunity to listen to it. We have instruments and access to hundreds of years of heart-meltingly beautiful pieces. We have the time to step away from the rest of life for a few minutes each day and experience the thrill of bringing this music to life under our hands. Through music, we co-create moments of transitory beauty.

These are the things I tell myself when the darkness closes in. These are the gifts that pull me back to life and hope when I’ve read too much of the news and have allowed fear and rage to steal my joy. These everyday gifts are the building blocks of life. They’re the tiny moments that expand our worlds beyond the outrage of the present moment and center us firmly in what matters the most. These gifts travel with us daily, but it is only when we start saying thank you for them that we can see them.

Gratitude isn’t an escape from truth. It never denies the bad. Gratitude just allows us to shift our focus, to expand our world, and to escape the clutches of all of those who wish to colonize our minds with their hate. Gratitude frees us to stop viewing everything as hopeless and to start acknowledging that most of us have been gifted with for more than what’s been taken from us. Best of all, from this position of gratitude and abundance we have the strength to begin dissipating the darkness around us with the light we’re privileged to embody.

“Be the light,” my dear Anglican nun friend reminds me. See the miracle in the mundane. And yes, these mundane things that form the web of our lives are miracles—maybe not in the traditional extraordinary sense of the word, but rather the one Albert Einstein once famously spoke of when he said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

So yes, I believe in miracles. I believe that—fools that we are—we’re protected by things seen and unseen. I believe that if we look for them, miracles abound in the food that graces our tables and the faces of the ones we love. I believe that as a member of a species that does any number of foolish things every day before breakfast that somehow, despite ourselves, we’ve managed to build functioning societies, take care of our old, and educate our young. I believe that miracles aren’t found in the extraordinary but rather in the gift we all have of seeing the face of the Divine in the ordinary, if we’re only willing to look for it. We find it here, in the humble, everyday, easily dismissed threads that form the tapestry of our lives.

This is where we start. This is gratitude.

Photo by Megan Watson, courtesy of UpSplash