Musings on Gratitude, the Adoptee, Enemas, Mystics, and Impudent Thanks

I was doing a meditation this morning that focused on the heart and feeling gratitude—on having gratitude radiate out of my heart, opening it, making my heart as big as the room, the town, the world.

The meditation felt really good. My heart felt like a stick of butter, melted. But the word “gratitude” stayed in my mouth for a while after, and I have to admit it had a slightly stale, bitter taste.

When you are adopted often it’s like you are a dog and you receive tags: one has your new name on it and the other is etched with “be grateful”.

Gratitude isn’t like an enema someone can shove up your rear. It is something that has to come from within.

The problem is that with kids who have high ACE scores (if you are reading this and don’t know what they are, I very highly recommend Nadine Burke Harris’s book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity) the brain is focused on surviving life, not on thanking it.

Thank you, relinquishment and adoption, for chronic anxiety. Thank you for depression. Thank you for confusion. Thank you for tears. Thank you for questions. Thank you for isolation, for loneliness, for suicidal ideation.

It makes so much more sense to the traumatized brain to live in fear, to live in no, to live in the land of the hungry ghost where whatever you have is not right, not enough. Being a hungry ghost is exhausting. It’s like being a vacuum cleaner with no off button and with an aching body that feels it might die of starvation.

So telling a vacuum cleaner to be grateful that it gets to suck up whatever is around it is like telling an untreated diabetic he’s lucky he gets to drink so much water.

But if the past hands us one bit of agreed-upon information, it’s that gratitude makes life better. Mystics, priests, whirling dervishes, poets, gurus, and yoginis have told us in countless languages that gratitude connects us with each other, with the earth, with the universe, with spirit.

The Zen master and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh asked, “What would it be like to awaken each morning in gratitude, aware of the precious gift that the new day has to offer us?”

It is so helpful to have a goal. I would like to have the goal of waking up each morning in gratitude.

I think one stumbling block for many adoptees is that our obvious and initial goal, the same one the shot arrow has for its target, is that our obvious and initial goal—finding answers for the questions Why didn’t she keep me? Who am I without her? How can I survive without her? —isn’t considered a holy or noble or even time-worthy pursuit by the larger world. In fact, these questions are seen as inconsequential, and, therefore, the adoptee then also feels inconsequential.

There aren’t many classes out there on how to feel grateful for being inconsequential.

So, I would argue, the first step towards having the ability to immerse one’s self in gratitude is understanding the importance of the primary questions.

I would also argue that feeling gratitude is a personal choice, not one that can be forced by the outside world (and perhaps even not from the inside world). Just as one can not force freckles to appear on a child’s nose without a dose of sunlight, a person can not demand of oneself or another for gratitude to magically appear.

Gratitude is a practice. It’s a decision. It’s a miracle. It’s a discipline. With enough light, gratitude appears. The miracle is that the light can happen in even the darkest places. Ask Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi or Anne Frank or Rocky.

I have the feeling that being a person who walks around the world seeking gratitude is sort of like the a daisy wishing it were a daisy. I have the feeling we are gratitude, and what keeps so many of us from recognizing it is the pain of feeling separated from others.

I like the darkly edgy. I like Sid and Nancy, Jesus when he went into the market and caused a ruckus. I like Fleabag and Charles Bukowski. I also like the polite, the kind, the more lightly edgy. My father. Tara Brach. Nina Riggs, whose memoir The Bright Hour I just tore through in two days.

Maybe gratitude comes from the edge. People stand on the edge of a cliff, look over, and feel so grateful they are not falling because it means they still get to be part of things, still get to be connected to others.

We are born and we know we are going to die. We stand on that edge, always. The pain of losing another human being can be borderline unbearable, so there is the edge of what we can tolerate.

We can react to the edge in fear which can sour into anger which can pollute an entire life, or we can react with thank god and see what happens next. Curiosity seems so much more fun than fear.

But those in fear often need a hand.

How can we be more present for others? For ourselves?

Accidents of Birth by William Meredith

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.

—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion

The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Spared by a car or airplane crash or

cured of malignancy, people look

around with new eyes at a newly

praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.

For I’ve been brought back again from the

fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie

down for long naps. And I’ve also been

pardoned miraculously for years

by the lava of chance which runs down

the world’s gullies, silting us back.

Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet

happened away.

But it’s not this random

life only, throwing its sensual

astonishments upside down on

the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,

not just me being here again, old

needer, looking for someone to need,

but you, up from the clay yourself,

as luck would have it, and inching

over the same little segment of earth-

ball, in the same little eon, to

meet in a room, alive in our skins,

and the whole galaxy gaping there

and the centuries whining like gnats—

you, to teach me to see it, to see

it with you, and to offer somebody

uncomprehending, impudent thanks.