Thank you

Excellent advice (not mine) on cultivating gratitude.

This Thursday is American Thanksgiving. One of my friends hates this day so much that she comes up with elaborate schemes to avoid it. One year might find her camping off the grid. Another traveling abroad. This year, she’ll be staying home and reglazing her bathtub.

I get it. Holidays can be tricky.

Much like my friend, I have complicated feelings around Thanksgiving — there’s the history behind the day, the way it’s taught and celebrated, assorted family dynamics… As Ram Dass said, “If you think you are enlightened, go home for Thanksgiving.”

The peculiar barbarism of sharing a bird with a bird.

I often think it’s too bad Gratitude had to get caught up in all that. Because in theory, Gratitude — capital G, like a virtue — is a beautiful, by many measures essential, thing to cultivate.

Over the years, I’ve tried and failed to institute a formal gratitude practice. There have been journals. There have been lists. There have been rituals — at night, in the morning, alone and with others. In practice, it often meant listing various versions of “dog, partner, home” — aspects of my life for which I am deeply grateful, but didn’t get to the heart of awareness that I was going for.

I now realize this is why I run, an activity I would despise if it didn’t help deliver me into the hands of mindfulness. With every step, I am aware of the breath in my lungs, of my feet rolling over the ground. I am aware of the air on my skin, and grateful for my ability to feel it. I am aware of the scenery around me, and grateful for my ability to see it. One cannot experience gratitude — the granular, salient kind — without paying attention.

Recently, I was reading Sarah Ruhl’s very excellent memoir, Smile, when one passage stopped me in my tracks.

She asks a doctor how she empathizes with really tough cases — patients nearing the end, where treatment is no longer an option, or those dealing with a loss that is related to their identity. The doctor tells her that she sometimes asks patients to make a list of things they are grateful for. “Not the generic things people always list at Thanksgiving… like ‘I’m grateful for my friends and family’ but all the specific things you rely on in life.”

And then, the kicker.

“Then imagine if you don’t put every specific thing on the list, they might disappear by midnight.”

This is what should be inscribed inside of those daily gratitude journals. Suddenly a list springs forth, longer and more nuanced than its predecessors.

At this very moment:

I am grateful for the ability to type.

I am grateful for the sunlight streaming through the window.

I am grateful for you, right now, reading this sentence.

I am grateful for the energy exchange of sharing thoughts and stories and ideas, and for the weird technology that makes it possible.

Writing (and reading) is a profound privilege and one I never take for granted.

After sharing the doctor’s advice, Ruhl begins to list what she is grateful for — hot showers, cool tap water, her husband’s heartbeat — stopping to share that she aches for any readers who might want something she has. “And yet,” she continues, “knowing that we all have different, incomprehensible losses, and different kinds of plenty, I keep writing.”

It’s been a time of incomprehensible losses. There is much to feel and much to do and much that remains unknown. Despite it all, may we see and acknowledge our particular kinds of plenty — on all days, including and especially the tricky ones.

Card of the Week

Here is this week’s card for the collective, as well as some thoughts to carry into the days ahead. As most modern readers will tell you, the tarot is not about fortunetelling, nor is it about neat, definitive answers. The cards are simply one path to reflection, a way of better knowing ourselves and others through universal themes. If this reading resonates with you, great! And if not, no worries. Take whatever may be helpful and leave the rest.

Featuring the PrismaVisions Tarot Deck by James R. Eads

For three years in my twenties, I lived in an apartment like something out of a TV show — where New York looks like a fun place full of quirky and accessible real estate. It was a big, old loft on the fifth floor of a former pasta factory, with concrete floors and exposed pipes that ran along the ceiling. The front wall was lined with windows that looked out onto the Manhattan skyline, a changing landscape that never got old.

That building, once an under market haven for artists and makers, has since turned into luxury condos, a story that is all too familiar. The view is now obscured by the taller luxury condos that were built across the street.

But it was amazing while it lasted.

The morning I moved out, I woke up at dawn to finish the last of the packing. The rising sun shone extra bright against downtown Manhattan, putting on its final performance. As the beams filled the empty living room, all I could think of was that Robert Frost poem — Nothing Gold Can Stay.

Sometimes, like those final moments spent in that apartment, I hungrily wish I could live all of life’s moments at once. But of course, that is not possible.

In the Nine of Pentacles, a person stands in a beautiful garden, surrounded by natural wonders — a technicolor tree, a flower of storybook proportions. A falcon sits on their shoulder, its sights trained on something in the distance.

In tarot, nines can often signify nearing the completion of a journey. Perhaps you’re on the cusp of reaching a goal, or making some sort of move. But this card humbly asks that wherever you are, and wherever you may be headed, that you stop for a moment and appreciate the view.

There is a hint of perfectionism around the number nine — to the tune of “it’s good, it’s great even, but it’s not quite ten.” There is a certain amount of desire to see that extra ten percent. But is it necessary? (Is it even possible?)

Perfectionism, I’ve learned, isn’t actually the practice of doing things perfectly. It’s the act of continually telling yourself, no matter how valiant the effort, that you are not quite good enough. It’s the friend of those who market self-improvement products…and pretty much no one else.

The Nine of Pentacles is here to remind us that this kind of thinking is batshit. It asks us to take stock of what we have, what we’ve done, how far we’ve come. What have you learned? What awareness have you cultivated?

In the days ahead, notice what is gold about this particular moment, whatever this means to you. It could be tangible or invisible. There are no right or wrong answers.

Nature does not acknowledge perfection, but rather, wholeness. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, it merely cycles, cycles, one golden moment giving way to the next. Nature loves a nine. And, this card would like to tell us, so can we.

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