Category Archives: mindfulness

Gratitude

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Photo by Eileen Barrett, 2023

What is the opposite of gratitude? Today I think of it as taking things for granted. Because isn’t that what often triggers gratitude, when the deep meaning and value of everyday things suddenly hits us in the face, and we realize how we have not fully appreciated or reveled in any of it recently? I don’t write this to shame anybody, or to make us feel guilty for being ‘ungrateful.’ I often find contrast and comparison a helpful way to solidify an idea or learning. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate, and to all who do not, may this day and all days bring meaning and connection anyway! Onward:

How do I do gratitude well already?
–Like mindfulness, my gratitude practice is more informal than formal. That said, it is intentional and strong. I express gratitude often and readily; I feel it more frequently than I can say, and often more deeply than words can convey. I’ve also reflected on it long and continually; an early post on this blog, one of the original thoughts I most wanted to convey at the outset in April 2015, described the relationships between gratitude, generosity, and peace. Rereading it now, I still endorse it all, and then some.

How could I do better?
–ACK. Everything that I could do better in gratitude circles back to my most difficult relationships. DAMN. I suppose we each/all have our highest walls, the greatest inner challenges–the primary work of a given lifetime. *sigh* Funny, I was moved yesterday to journal more intentionally about what I take for granted, and my gratitude needle moved some. So more of that, maybe: a regular discipline around that for which I resist gratitude. How fascinating.

How does society already do gratitude well?

Not just lip service. I have written before that Thanksgiving feels contrived to me. I feel this less now than in 2016. Many people really do take this season, and this day in particular, to reflect more deeply in gratitude. My impression is that this grateful sense also often extends through the whole holiday season. So I wonder, with annual gratitude awareness, what is the cumulative effect and benefit, if any?

How could we all do better together?

Abundance mindset.
I think it’s worth sharing again what I wrote in that post from 2015. Referring to the Zanders’ work in The Art of Possibility:
“Scarcity is when there actually aren’t enough resources to meet everybody’s needs; scarcity thinking is operating as if this were the case, when it really isn’t. Scarcity thinking at its best may foster healthy competition and innovation, and at worst, aggression, indifference, or even violence. In contrast, the Zanders discuss the notion of abundance. If we lived and operated in a world we assumed to be abundant, or at least enough for our needs, what would that look like?
“…That peace that comes with thankfulness is the antithesis of scarcity. 
“When we practice gratitude, we practice peace. We exude it. It manifests in our expressions and actions. Gratitude makes us creative, by lifting the need to hoard and compete. We come together, collaborate, look for our common passions and visions. We offer more of ourselves to others because we have faith that they will do the same. We know because they did it before—that is why we are grateful.”

Make it part of who we are.
I also referenced David Brooks’s article on gratitude that year:
“…people with dispositional gratitude take nothing for granted. They take a beginner’s thrill at a word of praise, at another’s good performance or at each sunny day. These people are present-minded and hyperresponsive.
“This kind of dispositional gratitude is worth dissecting because it induces a mentality that stands in counterbalance to the mainstream threads of our culture.
“…people with dispositional gratitude are hyperaware of their continual dependence on others. They treasure the way they have been fashioned by parents, friends and ancestors who were in some ways their superiors. They’re glad the ideal of individual autonomy is an illusion because if they were relying on themselves they’d be much worse off.
“Gratitude is also a form of social glue. In the capitalist economy, debt is to be repaid to the lender. But a debt of gratitude is repaid forward, to another person who also doesn’t deserve it. In this way each gift ripples outward and yokes circles of people in bonds of affection. It reminds us that a society isn’t just a contract based on mutual benefit, but an organic connection based on natural sympathy — connections that are nurtured not by self-interest but by loyalty and service.”
So eloquent, that man, I admire him so much.

So, I’m still not all in on Traditional American Thanksgiving. One of my life goals is still to never cook a turkey. I do not oppose gathering, reflecting, communing–I love all of these things—any time, any day, for any reason, actually. Whatever we are doing this Thanksgiving, my wish for us all is that it’s meaningful, nourishing, and fulfilling. And if not, well, we can be with that too, and I wish that we may not suffer too much or unecessarily.
Peace and blessings on you all, my friends.
So grateful for this platform and opportunity to connect.

If you’re looking for something inspirational, listen to Granted, by Josh Groban.

Commitment

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Okay friends, last third of the month! How’ ya doin’, bored to tears? I’m having a BLAST! 😀
This is such good training for a daily writing discipline, sitting down with a skeleton plan and only a little flesh, healthy but stringy. Each writing session lifts some weight, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, and over time muscle appears, strengthening some part of a larger body of message. Ooo, maybe I can set a mental vision for the BFHP (book)… acorn to oak tree? Clark Kent boy to teen to Superman? 7th grade to varsity volleyball team? Or ooo, Queen Lenora from Emma Chase’s Royally Series Collection–princess to queen great grandmama… Anyway, motivation and energy to complete the book has persisted and accelerated for about five months now, which is exponentially more than at anytime in the last 8 years. Yay! So, onward, my peeps, 8 more to go and beyond!

How do I commit well already?
–It may take me a long time, but once I decide to do something, I usually follow through. Piano, med school, marriage, parenthood, leadership, blog, and now book. When one commitment conflicts with another (eg leadership vs parenting in 2021), I can usually prioritize pretty easily.
–I have clarity about my commitments. I reconcile them with core values, ethics, goals, relationships, and circumstances.

How could I commit better going forward?
–Focus. I was just thinking today how Husband has very focused and stable interests. Me, I have serial obsessions, often more than one at a time… A victim of FOMO, some might call me. But everything is just so interesting!! So I can essentialize; I’ll have to if I want to get this book written.
–Establish routines. Ethos workouts are now a solid 2-3 sessions per week, on set days and times with flexibility as needed. I have a bedtime alarm set, and Steve West on the Sleepiest app waiting to tell me a story or guide a meditation, so I’m motivated to get to bed, yay! Ooo, I could find set times to indulge in social media…FB and IG limits, here we come, boo hoo. It’s a looooong shot, and probably worth another try…
—Accountability. Posting a writing photo on IG every Sunday and then logging daily activity for the following week in the comments has been fun! I can look at my IG gallery and see the laptop with a different mug each time, and I look forward to reporting. My mugs are meaningful, and now I get to share them. I’m keeping a public log, but it’s not in anybody’s face–so it’s mostly for me and I also know anyone can call me out. I think it could work!

How does society do commitment well?
Honestly having a hard time with this one, my friends. Trying to think of what, exactly, we are committed to, as a collective? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? How does that manifest, for everybody? For every potential value or goal that comes to mind, I can think of some who are committed and others who oppose–or at least apparently so. These days it feels like the only thing we are collectively committed to is being right, proving others wrong, and winning whatever fight engages our attention at the moment.

So maybe we need to scale down the question? What commitments do you and your overlapping cohorts uphold well right now? What are you committed for and/or against? What are your committed objectives, short and long term? Why? At the end of your life, how will you be at peace with your commitments? With society’s?

…Then again, maybe science? Medicine? Social programs? Diplomacy? Justice? Lots of people are committed to these things, which I admire. So maybe I need to reframe–maybe it’s too optimistic to expect, or even wish for, any universally shared collective commitments?

How could we do better together?
But maybe it’s not too optimistic. At the end of the day I sincerely believe we all want the same things for ourselves, and for one another, to varying degrees. Right now it seems like too many people tell the story that the pie is too small, and if someone else gets more then I and mine necessarily get less. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s not wrong–except in premise–humans are remarkably creative; we can all get what we need. There have been historical periods of shared collective commitment, such as World War II and post-911 (somewhat). The Civil War and 1960s, and now, feel like epitome periods of division.

25% of the way through The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe, written in 1997, I actually feel better about the future of humanity than I did last week. I’ve been thinking that we are all now headed straight to our inevitable collective demise, but these authors posit that every Unraveling/Crisis period feels like that, and we always come out of it into a High and then an Awakening, in recurring cycles about every 80-100 years:

“First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history.
“Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.”

I withhold judgment on the authors’ conclusions so far, but their thesis seems plausible…

In the end, I suppose we each/all must decide what goals, activities, etc. are worth our precious time, energy, and resources, both individually and collectively. I have no illusions of actual world peace. I’d just like a little less hard core, mindless, violent, local and global conflict, maybe in my lifetime? So: What commitments can we each and all make, in our nested and overlapping cohorts and communities, to get closer to that?

Judgment

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How do you feel about judgment? When/what are you most likely to judge quickly and negatively? Do you notice when this happens? Is it okay? How does it affect your mood, conversations, and relationships? How does your judgment help you and those you love? When does the judgment of others hurt you? How do you think we could all do it better?

How do I do judgment well already?
–I make evaluative judgments a lot less often now than in the past. For instance when I dislike an outfit, I say it’s not for me rather than call it outright ugly. I keep my individual, subjective opinions as such, rather than declaring them mindlessly as universal objective truths.
–Similarly about people, I identify behaviors and actions separately from people themselves. A kind person can do unkind things; an honest person may sometimes tell a lie. When I witness one unkind or untrue thing, that does not necessarily define the person’s whole character. At my best, observing a nonvirtuous action by someone I know to be virtuous prompts me to check in with them and see if they are okay.
–I can withhold judgment a long time; I tolerate uncertainty and stay open for any interaction or relationship to evolve toward connection, even if it starts out far from it. I attend conscientiously to my lack of complete information to minimize misjudging, which too often leads to hurting people and damaging relationships.

How could I do better?
–Once I make a negative evaluative judgment about a person, group, or institution, I let that bias lead thereafter. In many cases I can keep the door to changing my mind open at least a crack, but I know which doors are shut and locked today. I could open my mind to the possibility that people and organizations can change; I could unlock those doors.
–I can mitigate my meta-judgment. I value open-mindedness and curiosity and loathe narrow-mindedness and knee-jerk early closure. Thus, I judge others’ (and my own) judgment acutely and strongly in the negative. Funny how this makes me exactly what I hate. Working on it–with mindfulness, self-compassion, forgiveness, accountability, and perspective taking… This is my work.

How does society do judgment well today?

Dialectical Behavior Therapy. More and more, DBT integrates into mainstream talk therapy, and some places are even incorporating DBT skills into school curriculum. DBT teaches us to distinguish between evaluative and discriminating judgments:
–Evaluative: “stating something as a whole and objectively. It is taking the facts of a situation and adding personal preferences, values, and opinions to make it an objective truth. This type of judgment is ineffective because others may view the same situation differently, whether it is marginally different or completely different.”
–Discriminating: “reflect personal preferences and subjective opinions. They are considered judgments that are effective in terms of not projecting one’s perception as a complete conclusion.”
The more this distinction enters general consciousness and awareness, the less our differences and disagreements may escalate into outright opposition and hatred.

How can we all do better?

Stop reinforcing click-bait, incendiary soundbites, oversimplification, and overgeneralization. Before forming and rendering an opinion on anything:
–Ask whether an opinion or position is even necessary–is it worth the time, energy, and resources?
–Vet the information: How reliable is the source? What is their motivation?
–Look for contrary examples of an initial judgment; evaluate honestly the merits of both/all sides of a debate
–Commit to disengaging from information sources–including people–that/who incite, amplify, and perpetuate hair-trigger judgment

BREATHE. Take time. Most things are not an emergency, and additional information is readily available. This is the harder, longer, more complicated path, this slowing and elevation of judgment. And certainly some situations require immediate decision and action. But knee-jerk is too often our collective default judgment setting, and we need better balance.

Make more generous assumptions, at least initially. I would rather regret being too kind than not kind enough. The proverb that people rise or descend to our expectations of them is at least partially true. Since we all make evaluative judgments anyway, why not show up to people in a way that invites–calls–their best selves forth? We can sense one another’s judgments, verbalized and overtly expressed or not. Body language and tone of voice reveal us. So let us be less judgmental, so that we can seem so, also. It’s the honest thing to do.

I really enjoyed thinking about this topic tonight. It reminds me how easily we can fall into oversimplified, dichotomous thinking (and judgment, HA!) about judgment–that it’s all bad and we should eliminate it altogether, or that it’s always necessary in all situations lest we don’t know what we think about anything. Maybe we can think of judgment as a tool, a skill–something we can exercise mindfully to help us make sense and meaning, both individually and collectively. At its best, judgment provides clarity, direction, and connection. At its worst, it polarizes, instigates, and leads to violence. We can each and all do our part to bend the long, human, moral arc toward the former.