Gratitude In Our Ordinaries: Delights Of The Ordinary No.22

It is pretty great to find good and not so good reasons to be thankful! Happy Thanksgiving.

“Even though we think of it as an independent business, what matters… more than anything are the relationships you have with people. I guess that’s probably true of the world in general,” he said…

- Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

Biologists at the University of Glasgow took two groups of baby goldfish and placed one group in abnormally cold water and the other in abnormally warm water. The fishes living in their cold-aqua-home had a slow growth while those in their warm comfortable-aqua-homes grew faster than normal.

When put back in regular temperature water both these sets ultimately grew up to become normal, full-sized adults.

But the detail was in this – the fish in challenging cold water, with slow growth went up to live 30% longer than average and those with comfort-induced hyper-growth rate died 15% earlier than average. This was because all the artificial growth caused tissue damage as a result of not being trained to use its resources and repair itself; while the slower-growing fish knew the tough stuff early on and were trained to allocate resources to maintenance and repair!

This is not just true for mini goldfish but also for trees, rats and even humans!

Because we may be learning the ins and outs of life, clearing the in-between muddles, and bettering the leaks and not growing faster, someday we realize that it is these stiff and strenuous trails that nurtured us to muscle through in the length of time.

In Most Ways, Gratitude is a Larger Version of Thanksgiving

Thence, as we drill through the liturgy of Thanksgiving and the coming holidays (we call Christmas) when the trance of busyness lifts and the blackout curtain of daily demands parts to let the radiance in, we are not to censor or filter out the painful from the delightful moments of life. To answer “When you feel down in the dumps or find yourself in a funk, how do you cope?”

Not everyone and everything has to be pristine and shiny for us to be grateful!

Gratitude is both a state and a trait (Jans-Beken et al., 2020) and according to Dr. Robert Emmons, the feeling of gratitude involves two stages –

• First, the acknowledgement of goodness in one’s life, affirming that all in all, life is good and has elements that make it worth living.
• Second, gratitude is recognizing that sources of this goodness lie outside ourselves. One can be grateful to our creator, other people, animals, and the world, but not to oneself. At this stage, we recognize that our lives can be fruitful and who to thank for it.

These two stages of gratitude comprise honouring our lives. Through this process, we recognize the worth of everything – the delightful or the hardships- and they all form our lives and ourselves.

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes” – Annie Dillard

And so we are not solely thankful for just the good fat choicest portions but also grateful for the share of the bleak sky we have! Gratitude is like saying, “We are holding them both and confess that even though we were wisest of the wise in our eyes still we keep breaking, making errors and finding the toughest terrains that might linger on more than we anticipated yet we are grateful because they have shaped us to combat for a longer length.”

Gratitude is not a passive emotion that leaves you to sigh over the quandary and do nothing about it. The wonderful thing about gratitude is it makes you a little less anxious about the future and more alive in the present. It lends you the needed energy to find ways to yank through the hardships and allocate resources to maintenance and repair from the tough stuff as a life strategy!

You can ask the goldfish about it!Subscribe

And yet, paradoxically enough, it is in receiving that we most often trip up — for to receive is an act of tremendous trust and tremendous vulnerability. True gratitude has as its object not what is given but what is received. The art of receiving is therefore the precursor to any sense of gratitude — our deepest wellspring of thanks-giving.

– Maria Popova

I am not different than you. We all see the same world just different episodes in different timelines. “We like to gripe because it makes us feel better short-term, but long-term it doesn’t help us very much. Like everything else, we do it because we like “easy,” and it can make us feel better in the moment. But as a life strategy? It doesn’t work out so well, it appears.”

That is why letters are a good thing because they are like reminders in our ordinary catastrophes which we would generally not google about. We may google how to ease our backache or how to pop a giant pimple, but gratitude is an extremely far-off problem especially when we are dealing with annoying backache, pimple or to say your boss! And so with all these simple reminders which are just as utterly complex to practice in our real lives, we can together ponder and try to navigate and sift through the changes and caprices of living on this planet.

And as we wind down this year, slowly wrapping it up, I aim to call you to maintain a thanksgiving posture through the rest of our year because all of us – you, me and my neighbour (who I have not seen to date) is fearfully and wonderfully made, and I am grateful for it.

Can we now look at life with a plenteous amount of gratitude!

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And as your weekly internet curator, some of my fave reads, links, and stuff –

To silly things:Try these silly exercises like tip-toeing as a ballerina dancer along the length of your room or wait, let me inspire you with another exercise… lift up the corners of your mouth and you will find… 🙂

To Read:If spiders can teach us life lessons? For Hormeze, who “likes to write good words and take nice pictures…” this has been the case. He catches immaculate life lessons while photographing spiders (during the global lockdown phase in his essay called, “5 Things Photographing Spiders Taught Me About Humans.” Here are his 5 lessons –

1. Human brains are… filter and assumption machines. Part of leading a meaningful life means adjusting the parameters of our filters and challenging our assumptions. 
2. It is easier than you might think to quickly redefine for yourself what is beautiful and what is monstrous. 
3. Patience is a kind of love. Waiting comes far easier to the fond-hearted.
4. Humans,… will pair-bond with anything. This is a good thing. 
5. Art and everything is easier with the community. 

To watch: How much do I blame YouTube shorts and reels for their quick dopamine effect! Yet they are those hard-to-ignore click-baity stuff and I click on all of it too. But here are the 5 tips for perfect mashed potatoes on the NYT YouTube cooking channel to make a perfect weekend gastronomical solace.

To End: A poem on gratitude As If To Demonstrate An Eclipse
by Billy Collins

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

See you next week!

– Anugrah