A Call to Gratitude

Subtly, quietly and somewhat unconsciously, I've spent much of my life believing it a burden.

Why a burden?

My species plunders and pollutes the planet on which its life depends.  The human social club boasts indoor plumbing, industrial food, oil gobbling convenience and household products covered in plastic. We are responsible for global deforestation, disappearing polar icecaps, unsafe drinking water, war, genocide, mass extinctions, caste systems built on inequities  and more. And we manage to do it all while contemplating our proverbial navel, glassy-eyed in front of a computer monitor or television screen.  How do we reconcile life's endless beauty with our astonishing capacity for ignorance? This question confounds me.  

By age twelve I'd heard about the golden carrot of enlightenment.  And with the certainty of youth I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, enlightened. No biggie right?  It seemed like the logical choice and once attained my life would be a blessing rather than a burden, so I imagined.  I threw myself into liberation with hair on fire determination, reading mystical texts, practicing long hours of meditation and dabbling in new-age, self-help hype alongside years of psychotherapy. Finally, decades later, I acknowledged  the unmistakable fact that I was a flawed human, tending the life around me with all the care I could muster.  Perhaps that was as good as it would get.

Then I heard something.

It wasn't necessarily new.  I'd heard the same thing countless times before but I was listening with fresh ears.

"The deleterious physical effects of stress are not implicit to stressful situations and events but are a product of our perception of those events."  

Hold up... this means that our interpretations of life events cause the negative effects of stress and not the events themselves.  Whoa! This turns the whole gene/environment causal theory of disease on its head. How we interpret our world determines our bodies response.

About face.

It's not life's lunacy that is to blame but my interpretation of it that is.  Hmm.

So here's a paradigm shift, what if life is a privilege?  What if the opportunity to consciously witness and experience this ever-present and disappearing now with full bodied aliveness is a gift? What if consciously appreciating this bodies capacity to breathe, taste, smell, touch, see, move, hear, think and FEEL is cause for thanks?

How would the body respond to that?

With gratitude.

There could be no other genuine response than gratitude, the ability to show appreciation for life's generosity and return in kind. I don't pretend to know what is going on here or what this evolving life on our spinning blue dot is up to but I can respond with appreciation for the life that beats my heart, breathes my lungs, digests my food and showers my senses day and night with experience.

That's something we all can do.

This blog is dedicated to unapologetic living with an attitude of thanks.

Please join me for 365 days of grateful.  Let's see where this year might take us.