The Debt of Gratitude

Being thankful isn't enough.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, so it’s the time of year when we hear the word gratitude about 300 times a day. Tomorrow around countless dinner tables, people who forgo grace will ask their guests to state their gratitude for something.

Guests will worry about what they’ll say when it’s their turn:

Can I really say I’m grateful weed is legal now? If I say I’m grateful for this person, will I hurt that person’s feelings? Perhaps gratitude for my dog is the safest bet. I’ll pick that.

Look, I’m all for gratitude. Really. Ever since I learned it changes the brain, I’ve made it a practice.

But it wasn’t always so.

When I got out of rehab eight years ago, I was not feeling grateful, I was feeling furious. Rage was the only emotion I felt.

While I was compulsively vomiting in a detox room over a thousand miles from home, I focused on one thing: it would end. One day, I’ll be well enough to get on a plane. One day, I will leave this fancy hell hole, go home, and get high.

There was no question I’d get high again. Opioids are the only thing which fix being dopesick.

I came home and sat at the kitchen table with my husband. I told him I was sorry, but I just couldn’t do it.

I cried with shame. I wanted to be different, I wanted to be the kind of person capable of getting clean, but I wasn’t.

He had planned a beach vacation for us a week after my return. I had to make a big decision. Do I give up immediately, or do I try and stay clean a week?

A week was my only goal. If I avoided heroin for one week, I wouldn’t ruin the vacation. If I had a habit when we went away, I would most definitely spoil it.

It seemed very bad manners to get a habit so quickly after he coughed up all that cash for treatment. I knew there were a group of people like me who could help, so I decided to give it a whirl.

All I can say is so far, so good. It’s not been a linear recovery, but I’ve managed, with an inordinate amount of help and support, to stay off heroin for over eight years. It remains a task I cannot accomplish alone. My brain wants to kill me.

I’ve accepted I’ve got a disease, a disorder of the brain called addiction. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and be free of it.

But I am free of the misery of active addiction. It’s everything to me, and the greatest gift of my life. I manage it in increments of 24 hours, because it’s much easier to behave myself for a day than forever.

Taking my life for granted will kill me. But because I am a petulant eye roller at heart, I had to take my opinion of the help I was given out of the equation. I took all the suggestions offered whether I liked them or not.

I still do. It’s a practice and a paradox. I do a lot of things I don’t want to do, and the reward is freedom. People less warped than I might call it self-discipline.

One of the suggestions given me early on was to focus on gratitude.

Somebody please kill me, I thought. It’s death by Hallmark Channel.

Gratitude seemed fake to me. I looked around the room and thought it was a trick people used to try and convince themselves they were happy.

Utter bullshit, I muttered.

Luckily for me, I’m a fan of science. I love reading about the human brain, especially as mine is so troublesome. I read an article which stated the science of gratitude. It can rewire our neural pathways. My brain can change.

Neuroplasticity was something of which I was previously unaware. The more I read, the more interesting it got. And I thought,

Wouldn’t it be great if I could rewire this brain of mine?

I started to practice gratitude. It was worth a shot, so I made gratitude lists. They went something like this:

Hot and cold running water

A toilet to flush

Climate controlled house

Gas money

My arms and legs work

It helped me to think of what I have. It shifted my focus away from my misery. And it’s no small thing to have hot water when over two billion people in the world don’t have access to basic hygiene.

Over time, reality hit me.

I do have a lot. I live in the land of plenty. I better be grateful, I live in one of the richest counties in the United States and have a view of the Hudson.

But there’s something about gratitude which has always disturbed me.

What about the people who don’t have plumbing? What about women who live in nations where governments prevent them from an education? What about people in war zones? What about all the people starving to death, right now?

Why are they suffering, and why do I have everything?

I don’t even have to go far from home. Every time I get a bad cold, I remind myself I should be swimming in gratitude each day I’m healthy. I have friends with cancer, friends with rare diseases, friends who would be dead without the ACA.

As I write, my husband sleeps next to me on a very cushy king-sized mattress. I have more than one friend whose spouse is dead, and I’ve witnessed their terrible grief.

I hear the great pain of my Jewish friends with family in Israel. I have neighbors with family in Ukraine. And every morning when I read the paper, I see photos of injured children in the Gaza Strip.

These children in Gaza haunt me most of all. Their suffering is devastating and a constant reminder we are failing as a species.

My gratitude is not enough. I cannot live on a planet with other humans and ignore their anguish.

While thinking about all this, my Great-Aunt Nancy came to mind. She’s been dead close to 40 years.

I am not a religious person. I don’t believe in the God so many people on earth claim, no matter what they call it. But my Aunt Nancy was religious, and before every meal she said grace.

Aunt Nancy was born soon after the turn of the twentieth century, and I’m not certain she ever left the decade. When I think of how she said grace, it strikes me how archaic the language was. I struggle to remember if the word was “thy” or “thine,” but it went in part like this:

Make us thankful for these and all thy blessings…

Keep us ever mindful of the needs of others.

I think Aunt Nancy was onto something. It’s no good being grateful if we don’t pay a debt to those who are suffering.

Keep us ever mindful of the needs of others. It’s the missing part of gratitude.

I’m unqualified to take a plane to Tel Aviv and negotiate a peace treaty and two-state solution. So what can I do to change the amount of suffering in that part of the world?

I don’t have an easy answer, but I have an inkling where it lies. We’ve got to move away from the business of war into the business of repair.

War is big business. There is no reason on earth to accept this. It’s a choice. Instead, we can choose to make money fixing the planet before it’s too hot to survive. We can choose to use less money for defense and more money on healthcare for all.

It’s too easy to say everything is hopeless. It’s not hopeless if we make a collective decision to change.

But I suspect our brains need to be rewired as a society.

We are wired for apathy, not action. We are wired to snuggle down into winter and binge watch Netflix. We are wired to shop on Amazon instead of driving to the store. We are not wired to bombard members of Congress with emails.

This is intentional. Well-fed consumers aren’t going to make too much noise. It’s against human nature to move away from comfort.

It takes practice to care about others.

On Thanksgiving, this is my wish. When asking friends and family what they’re grateful for, ask a follow-up question:

What are you going to do this year to ease the suffering of others?

I think it’s time to start repaying the debt of gratitude. Not to people who’ve made things easier for us, but to those who need it most—the helpless and the suffering.