Giving thanks
Jefferson Breland
(11/2024) Please note, I am not doing my annual rant about pumpkin spice. You are welcome.
For the last several months, I have written about unnecessary suffering, body scan visualization, how to use the information of your body scan, paying attention to the messages (symptoms) our body sends us, the effect our emotions have on our health, the body delivering the mail, and that everything happens for a reason.
Okay, okay, okay, I have been writing about this same stuff for years. Why? It is important, very important. It is a means for us to improve the quality of our health as well as all our relationships, and enjoy life more. That’s all.
This month, I am going to write about something simple, like a holiday. In fact, I am going to use the name of this month’s big holiday as the subject of this article, sort of.
One of the instant ways to improve the quality of your life is to be grateful. For what, you ask?
The short answer is everything. The long answer is everything.
Gratitude is an acknowledgment of what is so and recognizing your interrelationship with everything around you.
Gratitude is a gateway, a path to inner peace. It is not simply a formality, a way of being polite to others, of being nice, or being a good person. It is a necessary action for being fully present in the world. When you start looking for things to be grateful for, you will discover more and more opportunities to say thank you.
At it’s simplest, we may say, "Thank you" to someone who holds a door open for us to walk through at a convenience store.
If we want go bigger, we can be grateful for what might have been take for granted: a smile, a beautiful bird and its song, the color of the changing trees, a gorgeous sky, a gentle rain, walking on crunchy fall leaves, really observing the miracle your children or grandchildren are no matter their age.
At its most profound, gratitude is a statement that we are all in this life together and we that we are not alone.
Last month, I was at a gathering of friends and family the night before the wedding of my nephew. I met a a very nice couple named Pat and Dave. I spent much of my time at the gathering talking with them. As it happened Pat and Dave were not a part of the "wedding party." They were simply having a date night at the same venue.
Over the course of our conversation, not sure how the topic arose, I mentioned I write a column for a monthly, small town newspaper. Pat wanted to know which one, I began to tell her and she handed me her phone and said you better write it out, I have dyslexia. She asked what the subject of my next column was. I told her, "I’ve already started, it's about gratitude." And what she offered me comes under my heading of "There are no accidents."
Pat told me the following quote from Michael J. Fox. "With gratitude, optimism is sustainable. If you find something to be grateful for, then you can find something to look forward to, and you carry on."
For Michael, his statement is not about niceties. It is about quality of life. It is about survival. It is about life itself.
For context, Michael has been dancing with the progressively debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease since 1991. He received the diagnosis at the age of 29. In 2000, he created the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
He has been living with his diagnosis, his symptoms, the inevitability of his physical decline for 33 years, over half his life. In his dance of life, Michael has chosen to have faith that practicing gratitude, being grateful for everything, will offer him possibilities and therefore opportunities to live life as fully as possible.
Michael has transformed this potentially crushing life situation into a gift for himself as well as anyone else who pays attention.
Life happens. What we do next is everything. Gratitude is a great first step.
Gratitude is most powerful when we offer thanks for the "bad stuff." This not about being in denial. It is actually the opposite. It is a declaration that what has happened has actually happened. It gives us a moment to pause before we move forward.
Let me clarify this point with an example.
When my mother passed in April, 2021, I cried when I got the call from my brother. I was 2,500 miles from her when she exhaled the last time.
While taking in the news, I began to think, "Now she is no longer in chronic pain." "My brother was holding her hand when she passed." "My brother had to be there or he would not have forgiven himself." "Mom and I had a great talk three days ago." "She talked to her granddaughter two days ago." "I am so glad she didn’t die in a hospital." (She was in hospice care in a small, elder care home.) "I am so glad she had kind people caring for her."
Each of these thoughts is a form of gratitude. I began to look for the gifts of the circumstances of my mother’s death.
My relative peacefulness of mind then allowed me to begin the process of taking next steps for getting the family together and taking care of the legal nuts and bolts.
Later, the more formal gratefulness arrived. Thank you for being a great mom. Thank you for showing me what unconditional love is and looks like. Thank you for my life. Thank you for loving me even when you didn’t understand what I was doing. Thank you for, well, everything.
When life is going smoothly, we don’t notice how many things there are to be grateful for.
When stuff doesn’t work like our car not starting, the electric power going out, or the water in the tap is brownish from the utility work down the street, we usually complain and blame.
Life circumstances can be considered breakdowns or opportunities for breakthroughs. Inconveniences possibly, and we get to think differently. Necessity is the mother of invention, of creativity. One way to grease the wheels of creativity is to thank the situation for our chance to wake up to doing life differently.
It takes practice to thank the car for working up till now and the opportunity to walk places or call friends to help you. It takes practice to thank the power company for the opportunity to read by candle-light or see the stars more clearly. It takes practice to be thankful that we usually have safe drinking water and there is beer in the refrigerator.
Earlier I mentioned Pat and Dave.
Toward the end of our conversation, Pat Wadors ( I searched the book title to get her last name) shared with me that she has a book soon to be released: "Unlock your Leadership Story, How to Build Understanding and Motivate Teams Using Fables and Folktales".
As I mentioned, Pat told me she experiences dyslexia. What has she chosen to do in the presence of her challenge? She helps people. She writes books, gives lectures, and offers ways of understanding life on a deeper level.
As Meister Eckhart, a member of the Dominican order of the 13th & 14th centuries wrote, "If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough."
Thank you for your reading. May it serve.
Jefferson Breland is a board-certified acupuncturists licensed in Pennsylvania and Maryland with offices in Gettysburg and Towson, respectively.
He can be reached at 410-336-5876.
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