GRATITUDE

To Whom Are You Grateful?

To unpack the meaning of “grateful,” I checked my copy of “The Etymological Dictionary of the English Language” by W.W. Skeat. This is a facsimile copy of the book James Joyce used to pull apart words to make the thousands of puns and allusions he stuffed into Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.

I found that both Spanish and Italian for “thanks”--gracias and grazie respectively--descended from the Latin root gratus, meaning “pleasing.” Understandable, since both modern Spanish and Italian are descendents of Latin.

In English, that root is all over the place. We congratulate our achievers. If someone doesn’t appreciate a good deed, he or she is an ingrate. And in a linguistic twist, the root was incorporated into our word for something that isn’t necessary and for which we don’t have to be thankful at all: gratuitous.

A few months ago, I decided that when I pull the covers to my chin every night as I go to sleep, it’s good to count the day’s blessings, be thankful for the good I’ve experienced, and send my grateful feelings upwards and outwards.

But then I thought, when I’m feeling thankful, who or what am I thanking?

Being thankful is right and good. While not every daily occurrence is a blessing, much that happens to me or that I produce using whatever talents I have, is a gift, and thanks are due. The question becomes: is fortune showered on humans because that’s just how the universe works, or is there a mind with a purpose behind my good luck, and it’s to that being I’m addressing my thanks?

Gratitude seems to arise when I feel that I’m being given something for no apparent reason. If I’ve worked for a reward, the feeling that I earned it is satisfaction enough. But if something good comes my way unbidden, that’s what I can be thankful for. It’s unearned. It’s a gift. It’s a blessing. I didn’t do anything to deserve it. The good isn’t in me—it’s in what seems like a divine providence that dispenses gifts for purposes I can’t fathom. That’s what makes me grateful.

“What seems like divine providence.” Does that make me a deist? Not necessarily. Providence that emerges from divinity is a metaphor. It can also mean, “I don’t know where this gift comes from, but it seems to be from a higher realm where the gods—in the ancient classical sense of the word—live.” Or maybe it just means, “I don’t know where this gift comes from or why it comes to me, but it sure feels good.”

We humans seem to have a built-in mechanism to ascribe the mysterious to the infinite power of a deity. After all, a cause beyond our understanding might be a god. A scientist might say, though, a cause beyond our understanding just might be a cause we haven’t understood yet. Into such darkness science advances to throw light and reveal causes.

Brilliant minds have done just that. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) discovered that white light could be disintegrated into different wavelengths, each with its own color, laying the foundation for modern optics. His three laws of motion, the basic principles of modern physics, resulted in the law of universal gravitation. In mathematics, he discovered calculus. Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published in1687, was one of the most important single works in the history of modern science. Newton earned those insights, but he must have been impressed as he discovered the order and precision in the universe.

For us mere mortals, gratitude arises from recognizable gifts, like the beauty that enthralls us when we see a clear, moonless night sky revealing an exuberant display of stars. Doesn’t good fortune require a good fortune dispenser? Are we just lucky or does something guide goodness our way? If we bake an apple pie and it turns out to be the best damn apple pie we’ve ever tasted, aren’t we grateful? Maybe gratitude is simply a normal human response when goodness comes our way.

On the other hand, what to make of our misfortunes? We can sense danger coming, can’t we? Sometimes we just want to hang our heads and cry at the sheer crap we have to endure. Some days arrive bleak and grey and our mood echoes the weather. Who is shoveling that mess at us?

What is our place in all this? That really is the question.

Rather than conjuring up a deity on which to blame our good or bad fortune, let me suggest that we are, have been, and always will be, creatures with two opposite poles of energy. On one pole is the energy of the world, coming at us indiscriminately, sometimes delighting us, sometimes destroying us. I once had a phone call from an editor at Harper & Row, the publishing house, saying they loved the first book I wrote and agreed to publish it. And once I got a phone call from my dad telling me that there had been a train wreck and that my brother had been on that train and that he was dead. Luck of the draw. The cards are beyond our control. You never know what card will turn up next.

But wait—there’s another pole at the opposite end of our inner psyches, and this pole emanates the power that comes from being the master of our own destiny. Life can beat us with a baseball bat, but we can die laughing. Life can elevate us to highest exaltation, but we can be sour and say, “Is this all there is?” We have the power.

Look at it this way: life is sending us signals, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, promising and disappointing. Whether we know it or not, we are always tuned into these signals. Now let’s pretend that we have two antennae, one sprouting from behind each ear. One picks up the incoming goodness, the other picks up the bad news. As with a TV or radio antenna, we can tune each one to the frequency we like. We can turn the volume on each antenna up or down, focusing more on one or another frequency.

We can tune into a station that’s sending us good cheer, hot times, beauty, satisfaction, and harmony. We can also tune into the rattle and blare of disharmony coming from the other pole’s station. We can turn up the volume on the happy, warm, and fun channel, and we can turn down the volume on the dark one. The choice is ours.

In other words, do we choose to tune into gratitude for what life is tossing our way, or do we choose to turn up the volume on the screaming wretch that constantly whines and complains about life on the other channel?

We’re on our own here on earth. Life is surging in on us at a million miles a second in a trillion ways. Our basket of goodies can be overflowing with goodies or disintegrating into misery. It’s up to us. Goodness makes us feel grateful. To answer the question in the subhead at the onset of this essay, we can imagine that our gratefulness is given to a deity, or we can just express our grateful feelings into the silent, accepting void.

Be grateful that we have the chance to choose.

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