Good afternoon, Thom. This connection that you have just told us about is exactly where I am right now in trying to preserve the rest of my years for positive outcomes. If I am lucky and healthy, I might have twenty or so more.
I have been working with a very insightful therapist for couple of months now and have made an appointment with myself to each day walk, hike up the Arroyo upstream of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory nearby. Sitting on a comfortable stone yesterday, I was focussed on the sound of the stream. The canyon wall blocked all the sound of the nearby metropolis and the burbling stream was the only sound.
As I sat there for the next half hour looking at the water or closing my eyes, I was missing the word that described my feeling.
Gratitude. Thank you Thom. That is it and you described how I felt perfectly.
Have a great thanksgiving, I know it will be just you and Louise. For me it is my spouse and my cats,and that is all I need.
In the vein of your article. I am grateful every morning that I wake up, and grateful to go to sleep peacefully in a warm bed with a full belly. When so many in the world can't.
My beautiful wife and I walk our dog in our Lincoln, Ca (suburb of Sacramento) neighborhood every day, rain or shine. We challenge each other daily to find something to be grateful for. Maybe it's the leaves changing colors, newly planted flowers in a neighbor's flowerbed, the beauty of the sky that particular day, or any of a thousand other things. It is wonderfully refreshing! Thank you for all you do to help keep us sane, Thom!
I am grateful to you, Mr. Hartmann, for inviting me into the Substack world, where I have found hope that all is not lost.
I am also grateful that tomorrow my husband and I will once again celebrate Thanksgiving with four generations of a family who befriended us 50 years ago when we moved to Cleveland.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family, Thom. An attitude of gratitude really does help lift spirits. I’ve been doing it for quite some time now, and I am so grateful that I’m not downcast and hopeless in the face of the election. I plan to fight fascism and oligarchy in every way possible.
yasss! thank you! we all need to be taught more about neuroplasticity. it saved my life, at least twice. since our brains pay more attention to negative than positive thoughts as an evolutionary, flight or fight response, we have to train ourselves to seek, find, then focus on, the positive. even doing this for just a few moments every day can re-wire our neural pathways. people who know my family/ background call me the sperm that got away, but what really catapulted me out of white trash alley was an early awareness that positive thoughts can change a person. happy T-day to you and yours.
Totally agree with you Thom and feel you. I was once totally immersed in nature while living in Inverness, CA. Osprey nests, Cardinal woodpeckers squawking everywhere. Night lone walks to the top of Mt. Vision, hearing critters scurrying as I approached in the
dark. At the top I would be above the cloud cover looking down at a moonlit white blanket as far as the eye could see. I could go on about conversing with the trees, but I think you get it. Sadly that all ended when I moved to southern CA years ago. But happily I’m planning to head north again. Your article has increased my eagerness to make this happen. I’m also certain it will help me deal with this political climate.
Thom, I am grateful for being a subscriber to your letters. You're a breath of fresh air. Your knowledge, your ability to analyze and synthesize events that are life altering, and lastly your authenticity and honesty are what I am grateful for. I may not always agree with you, but I trust you to deliver the news as I was accustomed to growing up. Sadly, the media landscape has changed for the worse, IMO. Thank you again!
I’m a believer. When I look at situations in my life, I try to see the bullets I dodged. When I do this I feel I’ve lived a charmed life. Everyone suffers loss there is no avoiding it. But there are time you and look back and realize it could have been a hell of a lot worse.
I didn’t really know the feeling of gratitude until after my arrest and conviction. I was grateful that I was caught. More importantly, I was caught because someone said I did something that did not happen. And I am so grateful that he did that. I learned the true meaning of forgiveness. So how can I possibly have gratitude for something that put me in prison for almost 12 twelve years?? And I have a to life sentence which means that state can haul me back in for a perception of a violation for the rest of my life.
My gratitude is for the end of creating victims. The lie exposed the abuses I was doing. The point about the brain rewiring is very possible and powerful. It’s called neuroplasticity. People grow… and change. It’s easy to watch the news and cheer on police when they catch the criminal. And for many it’s just as easy to be glad when they get life in prison or some other harsh sentence. I was one of those people who thought the light of day should be only a rumor to criminals. I shamelessly voted for the 3 strikes law in Washington. In keeping with the topic of gratitude, I would not have known the humanity behind crime. So often we hear people saying that we have to pray for the victims!!! Yes. Yes we do. But there was at least one other involved in that act.. The alleged criminal. Do they not deserve our prayers? If you follow the Christian faith, it is part of the deal… forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. It’s in the book. People change.. some need more help than others but they change on some level. In Washington State the recidivism rate (meaning committing a new crime after the crimes already adjudicated) is under 5 percent for sex offenses. This is the Washington State department of corrections number. A far cry from the 95 percent falsely put out by advocates for harsher sentences as I once was. Am I suggesting that punishment goes away? Not at all. But punishment requires rehabilitation which is rare in Washington State prisons. Only a couple of crimes are afforded the opportunity to have to attend therapy.
I can seriously rant for hours on this but I don’t want to lose you, the reader. I want to have the conversations about it though. And how does this all tie in to gratitude? I never would have had my eyes opened to the criminal justice debacle if I hadn’t gone through it. I have become an advocate even though few people want to hear it. But you can’t unhear or unread something.
So think about this. Start a conversation with me. I am an open book. I will discuss the good bad and ugly of it because that’s how we learn.. the truth.I know I skipped around a bit but I Wanted to get this posted while Thom’s gratitude post was fresh.
Appreciation isn't the same as gratitude. Gratitude implies obligation to a benefactor - what the Japanese call an "on." I don't speak Japanese, but according to Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land," the Japanese have several different terms for gratitude, and all of them imply some degree of resentment (because someone else has "one-upped" the speaker). So people will go to great lengths to avoid acquiring an "on." A gift may be politely received by saying "I am insulted!"
In our own culture, some people push extravagant unwanted gifts on others, then expect gratitude or a huge favour. Many boys who take a girl to a movie and dinner now expect sex in return. My dad was so oversensitive to this dynamic that he wouldn't let my boss pay for our business lunch! (His instincts may have been right - that employer *had* been having an affair with the woman who had that job before me.)
Appreciation, on the other hand, is neutral. You can appreciate a flower growing in an unexpected place. It has nothing to do with you; it grew there by and for itself, and you happened by and saw that it was beautiful. Your only obligation is not to crush it! (Even that is asking too much for some vandals.) So appreciation is almost always a Good Thing.
However, all the gratitude exercises that I've tried so far just left me depressed and demoralized! The letter-writing one is the absolute worst. Most people don't want to receive one; it makes them acutely uncomfortable. They suspect (rightly) that the letter didn't spring from your heart; someone put you up to it. I don't care how many researchers approve of gratitude letters and journals; they have never worked for me. And I have spent hours, days, weeks, months and years with a long, long list of practices that were supposed to fix me, including NLP, yoga, neurofeedback, Landmark Forum (son of est), and on and on. Gratitude practices just don't work for me. You might as well ask me to play touch football. The gratitude letter reminds me of that dreadful early day of the Trump administration when all his lackeys competed in obsequious flattery!
I'd happily settle for an objective assessment of my faults and virtues - but not in the context of a performance review! These are almost like hazing rituals. Almost every review that I've witnessed has led to a firing, an angry resignation, or at least a squabble - because of that built-in "one-up" factor. In a well-managed workplace, employees receive quiet compliments or criticisms informally, "on the fly."
Yes, I was grateful for the privilege of spending 22 years alongside a real live Bodhisattva. I was grateful that he died peacefully in my arms via assisted suicide, instead of suffering like so many others that I've known. I was *not* grateful that our Emergency Room let him sit there for hours and then sent him home by cab without ever diagnosing or treating the stroke that left him blind, bedridden and hallucinating. They cited lack of ID (they had also let someone steal his wallet), but this was a bogus excuse, since the ambulance attendants had photographed his ID cards. I told them that he had a stroke in progress and was half-blind and very confused, with huge chunks of memory missing. The paramedics advised me *not* to come with him in the ambulance. The Covid pandemic was in full swing and the E.R. was a zoo. Yes, I am grateful for Canada's free health care system, but I am also angry and bitter that they couldn't be bothered to treat a stroke in progress. Someone may have thought, "This scruffy old man looks like a street person or drug addict. Triage him to be seen later."
Ram Dass survived for almost two decades after a similar stroke. He took the stroke as a teaching from his guru, until another follower told him that idea was ridiculous! Roedy's logical processes were never that far gone. He would not have wanted to live for another 20 years, bedridden, blind and hallucinating. His main fear was that the doctors wouldn't get around to his Exit Day until another stroke had left him unable to legally consent. His main regret was that he wouldn't be around to see how this planetary crisis turned out.
So... I am grateful for the fact that AIDS drugs gave him an extra 30 years of life. I am grateful that he departed peacefully in my arms, on his own terms, and that his family supported the decision. I am *not* grateful that assisted suicide was necessary in the first place, or that my brother is homophobic and had begun attacking Roedy on my Facebook page for some (likely imaginary) lack of phone etiquette SEVEN YEARS ago!
I am bitter and angry that most of the people in my hometown, home state and birth nation seem to be dumb as posts! Like the Ancient Mariner, I may continue to tell this story to every stranger I meet, even while I bless all the little live things with their fins and feathers and fur. I do not WANT to just let go of outrageous medical malpractice, nor the fact that taxicabs refused to pick us up in front of the street clinic. But I am grateful for his niece who helped me care for him, and for the mysterious stranger who first offered us a ride home and then - after all our stuff wouldn't fit into his car - somehow returned the $700 wheelchair cushion that we'd left there, though our address was not on it. (It was on the ground in front of our building the next morning.) The fact that the niece was available and eager to help was directly related to two crises in her own life, from which she needed distraction. Life is like the Chinese (?) story of the horse that ran away, returned with several mares, broke the leg of the teen son, which kept him from being drafted... and on and on. Good thing? Bad thing? I only know how I feel.
Too much positive thinking makes me want to sneak off and sit under a tree, ideally after ingesting a good psychedelic!
Hmm... I wrote about twice as much, and the second half has just disappeared. The phone rang while I was composing. Hope this isn't a duplicate post, but I retrieved the shitty first edit from my Drafts folder. I will do my best to avoid repetition!
The "positive psychology" guru, Martin Seligman, received his start-up research funding from a mysterious secret donor. The military somehow manages to co-opt everything about brain research, psychedelics, meditation, biofeedback, NLP, etc., that proves to work. Their mission is to get traumatized soldiers back onto the battlefield!
I was shocked to learn that even yoga was once used to maintain fitness for soldiers after India first won its independence. Power Yoga is perfect for thin adolescent males, and it established self-esteem, since very few British people were able to do it. One major story in the Hindu holy books involves convincing the warrior Arjuna to go into battle against his own family, despite his own moral misgivings! So I prefer gentle Hollywood New Age yoga to the original version.
Almost every famous guru has been caught up in some scandal by now. Gandhi is a revered figure for many, but he beat his wife, declared unilateral celibacy in a culture where divorce was unthinkable, and his nonviolent revolution was followed by a bloody massacre and several famines. Mother Teresa neglected her patients and gave most donation money to the Church.
The Buddha, in our own culture, would qualify as a deadbeat dad who walked away from his wife and infant to find himself. Decades later, he got tired and sat under a tree. I doubt that the family he abandoned thought he was so holy, but at least his absence caused no financial hardship. His teachings were better than most. I particularly like his advice that, if some statement offends your common sense, you must refuse to believe it, no matter who said it - even if *he* said it! You may still be wrong, but at least your reasoning begins from an honest basis.
I also like the fact that his first noble truth seems obvious to me: "Life is suffering" (or in another translation, "difficult"). Martin Seligman thinks that our emotional setpoint is largely genetic, and my dad was a unipolar depressive. His Seasonal Affective Disorder began to manifest in August - in Alabama! - and was diagnosed by his GP in the early Sixties when the condition was still almost unknown. I don't doubt neuroplasticity, since (with support from a team of psychic healers) my dad also made a full recovery from a stroke predicted to leave him a "vegetable." But he never liked to dance! :-D
My late partner was a trainer for the Living Love practices from Ken Keyes' "Handbook to Higher Consciousness." Roedy was the kindest person I ever knew. He attributed that to Living Love - but I learned from others at his Celebration of Life that he had *always* been kind, even as a child. During the 1980s Ethiopian famine, he sold his fully paid for house in Vancouver and donated the proceeds to
Oxfam and The Hunger Project. A brilliant computer programmer, he thought there'd be plenty more money where that came from. There wasn't. While working in India, he had met the Tata Industries tycoon and convinced him to bring computer technology to India. That soon put North American independent programmers out of business. Roedy didn't even have the concept of how to write a resume or seek employment - jobs had always come to him!
He had infinite patience with me, but turned into a holy terror when faced with proponents for the Iraq War. He saw all soldiers as potential child-killers! That comes with the job description.
I do appreciate the enormous amount of work that Thom has put into sharing his knowledge over the years (perseverance furthers!), because Thom knows about the Dark Side. But I seem to be the only person in this forum who has any misgivings about these Gratitude practices.
It's going on 2025 now. Our goal was to end world hunger by 1997... then 2000... then 2015... I did feel more upbeat while I still thought that was going to happen within my lifetime. The stats do look better now, but I no longer trust the stats. (See Buddha quote above.)
Dancing could still bring me joy (with the right people, to the right music), but most of what I've heard since the Seventies has not been music to my ears. Rap and hip-hop usually make me want to hit somebody! I attribute this to copyright laws and synthesizers. The latter were supposed to expand our options, not substitute for them! I'm reacting to the sound, not the lyrics. Those might offend me, too, but they're blessedly unintelligible. I guess today's youths think faster, if they can understand those words. But there's a more appalling explanation: MP3 files! Researchers have found that if you don't get to hear certain sounds when young, you will never be able to hear them. This applies to some tonal languages, and even to vowels for this Southerner ("pin" and "pen" sound exactly alike to me), but also to the nuances of music. I read one fascinating story by a man who had always heard in synaesthesia, but lost that ability after a stroke. He was helped by a variety of unlikely method, including a pair of Irlen glasses. Wearing these, even with his eyes closed, he regained his synaesthesia - but only for analogue records! They didn't work for digital music. I stopped playing recorded music when LPs and tape cassettes went away! My ear for music is not that great, so I never analyzed the difference; I just wasn't enjoying it as much. I'm not a techy, but most likely MP3s have now been replaced by recordings that capture more information, so maybe only one or two generations lost their ability to hear anything but the base rhythm. (I *can* appreciate a good live percussionist, but have heard maybe three in my lifetime.) One fast food chain during the 1990s found that they could repel the pesky teenagers hanging out in front of their stores by playing Mozart!
One of my past jobs included captioning college classes for Deaf students in real time. Computer-generated captions used to be so horrible that a Deaf person could watch a talk show without having any idea of the topic. But the new mobile phones can do such a great job of recording and transcribing that these will probably replace the human captionist - though a proofreader will still be needed. Anyhow, during the course of my work with the Deaf, I met quite a few retired musicians! No surprise there - those loudspeakers cause hearing loss. So some opted for cochlear implants. To their dismay, at first they couldn't tell whether that noise was their favourite song on the radio, or a motorcycle going past! Eventually, most learned to "hear" and enjoy musical numbers that they already knew, but anything new would always sound like noise to them. (Maybe not percussion - I haven't looked into that, but there's at least one professional Deaf percussionist.) But my dad thought that even Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" was "just noise," and I hear their work as quite melodious. Is it *that* different from the Rockabilly that my parents grew up with?
Good music is also something that I could be grateful for, but that has been largely drowned out by all the racket that I can perceive only as parent repellent. Luckily, I never had to raise any teenagers. I did play housemother to two teen roommates, but that was during the 1970s when music was great! Then came disco, which many music lovers complained about bitterly at the time. By now it sounds refreshingly melodious!
Am I done yet? I alternately enjoy and suffer from "hypergraphia." No essay is complete until I have explored the topic from all angles! People don't have much patience with that verbiage today. But I do need a launching pad, which in this case was Gratitude.
I'm extremely depressed now, which is usual for December, but worse without Roedy. But I don't dare go out and socialize at random, after seeing what Long Covid did to Roedy, and hearing about Thom's neighbours who took Thanksgiving plane trips! (Thanks for that warning, Thom. It irks me that people have become so casual about Covid, but with RFK Jr. in charge of health policy, we'll soon be getting used to ailments that had become no longer a threat.
Ironically, however, Elon Musk seems to be the *only* billionaire funding research into controlling the aging process, the most prolonged unpleasant thing that many of us will ever experience - if we don't die first! While enough elders remain to form a voting bloc, we do need to vote the grifters out of office. If the Boomer generation is indeed responsible for electing those jerks (as many young people blame us for), they are right to be angry. And that could soon translate into lack of Social Security and elder care!
Good afternoon, Thom. This connection that you have just told us about is exactly where I am right now in trying to preserve the rest of my years for positive outcomes. If I am lucky and healthy, I might have twenty or so more.
I have been working with a very insightful therapist for couple of months now and have made an appointment with myself to each day walk, hike up the Arroyo upstream of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory nearby. Sitting on a comfortable stone yesterday, I was focussed on the sound of the stream. The canyon wall blocked all the sound of the nearby metropolis and the burbling stream was the only sound.
As I sat there for the next half hour looking at the water or closing my eyes, I was missing the word that described my feeling.
Gratitude. Thank you Thom. That is it and you described how I felt perfectly.
Have a wonderul Thanksgiving.
Thanks Thom, for an uplifting and much needed message in these fraught times. You are a blessing and an inspiration.
Have a great thanksgiving, I know it will be just you and Louise. For me it is my spouse and my cats,and that is all I need.
In the vein of your article. I am grateful every morning that I wake up, and grateful to go to sleep peacefully in a warm bed with a full belly. When so many in the world can't.
My beautiful wife and I walk our dog in our Lincoln, Ca (suburb of Sacramento) neighborhood every day, rain or shine. We challenge each other daily to find something to be grateful for. Maybe it's the leaves changing colors, newly planted flowers in a neighbor's flowerbed, the beauty of the sky that particular day, or any of a thousand other things. It is wonderfully refreshing! Thank you for all you do to help keep us sane, Thom!
I am grateful to you, Mr. Hartmann, for inviting me into the Substack world, where I have found hope that all is not lost.
I am also grateful that tomorrow my husband and I will once again celebrate Thanksgiving with four generations of a family who befriended us 50 years ago when we moved to Cleveland.
Happy Thanksgiving Thom. I just received my books on ADHD and Oligarchs, so already grateful!
Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family, Thom. An attitude of gratitude really does help lift spirits. I’ve been doing it for quite some time now, and I am so grateful that I’m not downcast and hopeless in the face of the election. I plan to fight fascism and oligarchy in every way possible.
yasss! thank you! we all need to be taught more about neuroplasticity. it saved my life, at least twice. since our brains pay more attention to negative than positive thoughts as an evolutionary, flight or fight response, we have to train ourselves to seek, find, then focus on, the positive. even doing this for just a few moments every day can re-wire our neural pathways. people who know my family/ background call me the sperm that got away, but what really catapulted me out of white trash alley was an early awareness that positive thoughts can change a person. happy T-day to you and yours.
Totally agree with you Thom and feel you. I was once totally immersed in nature while living in Inverness, CA. Osprey nests, Cardinal woodpeckers squawking everywhere. Night lone walks to the top of Mt. Vision, hearing critters scurrying as I approached in the
dark. At the top I would be above the cloud cover looking down at a moonlit white blanket as far as the eye could see. I could go on about conversing with the trees, but I think you get it. Sadly that all ended when I moved to southern CA years ago. But happily I’m planning to head north again. Your article has increased my eagerness to make this happen. I’m also certain it will help me deal with this political climate.
Love this message - thanks very much! (oops - I'm already utilizing it!)
Thom, I am grateful for being a subscriber to your letters. You're a breath of fresh air. Your knowledge, your ability to analyze and synthesize events that are life altering, and lastly your authenticity and honesty are what I am grateful for. I may not always agree with you, but I trust you to deliver the news as I was accustomed to growing up. Sadly, the media landscape has changed for the worse, IMO. Thank you again!
I'm very Thankful that you are in my life and that you have written such great books.
Love you both. Remain healthy, happy, wealthy and with us! 💙❤️😍😘💕
Thank you Thom. Thank you to everyone of you here.
This world truly is nothing more than what we make of it - through action, and perception.
I’m a believer. When I look at situations in my life, I try to see the bullets I dodged. When I do this I feel I’ve lived a charmed life. Everyone suffers loss there is no avoiding it. But there are time you and look back and realize it could have been a hell of a lot worse.
My partner vowed never to play the "worst case scenario" game with me again, because things can *always* get worse!
I didn’t really know the feeling of gratitude until after my arrest and conviction. I was grateful that I was caught. More importantly, I was caught because someone said I did something that did not happen. And I am so grateful that he did that. I learned the true meaning of forgiveness. So how can I possibly have gratitude for something that put me in prison for almost 12 twelve years?? And I have a to life sentence which means that state can haul me back in for a perception of a violation for the rest of my life.
My gratitude is for the end of creating victims. The lie exposed the abuses I was doing. The point about the brain rewiring is very possible and powerful. It’s called neuroplasticity. People grow… and change. It’s easy to watch the news and cheer on police when they catch the criminal. And for many it’s just as easy to be glad when they get life in prison or some other harsh sentence. I was one of those people who thought the light of day should be only a rumor to criminals. I shamelessly voted for the 3 strikes law in Washington. In keeping with the topic of gratitude, I would not have known the humanity behind crime. So often we hear people saying that we have to pray for the victims!!! Yes. Yes we do. But there was at least one other involved in that act.. The alleged criminal. Do they not deserve our prayers? If you follow the Christian faith, it is part of the deal… forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. It’s in the book. People change.. some need more help than others but they change on some level. In Washington State the recidivism rate (meaning committing a new crime after the crimes already adjudicated) is under 5 percent for sex offenses. This is the Washington State department of corrections number. A far cry from the 95 percent falsely put out by advocates for harsher sentences as I once was. Am I suggesting that punishment goes away? Not at all. But punishment requires rehabilitation which is rare in Washington State prisons. Only a couple of crimes are afforded the opportunity to have to attend therapy.
I can seriously rant for hours on this but I don’t want to lose you, the reader. I want to have the conversations about it though. And how does this all tie in to gratitude? I never would have had my eyes opened to the criminal justice debacle if I hadn’t gone through it. I have become an advocate even though few people want to hear it. But you can’t unhear or unread something.
So think about this. Start a conversation with me. I am an open book. I will discuss the good bad and ugly of it because that’s how we learn.. the truth.I know I skipped around a bit but I Wanted to get this posted while Thom’s gratitude post was fresh.
I am grateful you read this
Appreciation isn't the same as gratitude. Gratitude implies obligation to a benefactor - what the Japanese call an "on." I don't speak Japanese, but according to Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land," the Japanese have several different terms for gratitude, and all of them imply some degree of resentment (because someone else has "one-upped" the speaker). So people will go to great lengths to avoid acquiring an "on." A gift may be politely received by saying "I am insulted!"
In our own culture, some people push extravagant unwanted gifts on others, then expect gratitude or a huge favour. Many boys who take a girl to a movie and dinner now expect sex in return. My dad was so oversensitive to this dynamic that he wouldn't let my boss pay for our business lunch! (His instincts may have been right - that employer *had* been having an affair with the woman who had that job before me.)
Appreciation, on the other hand, is neutral. You can appreciate a flower growing in an unexpected place. It has nothing to do with you; it grew there by and for itself, and you happened by and saw that it was beautiful. Your only obligation is not to crush it! (Even that is asking too much for some vandals.) So appreciation is almost always a Good Thing.
However, all the gratitude exercises that I've tried so far just left me depressed and demoralized! The letter-writing one is the absolute worst. Most people don't want to receive one; it makes them acutely uncomfortable. They suspect (rightly) that the letter didn't spring from your heart; someone put you up to it. I don't care how many researchers approve of gratitude letters and journals; they have never worked for me. And I have spent hours, days, weeks, months and years with a long, long list of practices that were supposed to fix me, including NLP, yoga, neurofeedback, Landmark Forum (son of est), and on and on. Gratitude practices just don't work for me. You might as well ask me to play touch football. The gratitude letter reminds me of that dreadful early day of the Trump administration when all his lackeys competed in obsequious flattery!
I'd happily settle for an objective assessment of my faults and virtues - but not in the context of a performance review! These are almost like hazing rituals. Almost every review that I've witnessed has led to a firing, an angry resignation, or at least a squabble - because of that built-in "one-up" factor. In a well-managed workplace, employees receive quiet compliments or criticisms informally, "on the fly."
Yes, I was grateful for the privilege of spending 22 years alongside a real live Bodhisattva. I was grateful that he died peacefully in my arms via assisted suicide, instead of suffering like so many others that I've known. I was *not* grateful that our Emergency Room let him sit there for hours and then sent him home by cab without ever diagnosing or treating the stroke that left him blind, bedridden and hallucinating. They cited lack of ID (they had also let someone steal his wallet), but this was a bogus excuse, since the ambulance attendants had photographed his ID cards. I told them that he had a stroke in progress and was half-blind and very confused, with huge chunks of memory missing. The paramedics advised me *not* to come with him in the ambulance. The Covid pandemic was in full swing and the E.R. was a zoo. Yes, I am grateful for Canada's free health care system, but I am also angry and bitter that they couldn't be bothered to treat a stroke in progress. Someone may have thought, "This scruffy old man looks like a street person or drug addict. Triage him to be seen later."
Ram Dass survived for almost two decades after a similar stroke. He took the stroke as a teaching from his guru, until another follower told him that idea was ridiculous! Roedy's logical processes were never that far gone. He would not have wanted to live for another 20 years, bedridden, blind and hallucinating. His main fear was that the doctors wouldn't get around to his Exit Day until another stroke had left him unable to legally consent. His main regret was that he wouldn't be around to see how this planetary crisis turned out.
So... I am grateful for the fact that AIDS drugs gave him an extra 30 years of life. I am grateful that he departed peacefully in my arms, on his own terms, and that his family supported the decision. I am *not* grateful that assisted suicide was necessary in the first place, or that my brother is homophobic and had begun attacking Roedy on my Facebook page for some (likely imaginary) lack of phone etiquette SEVEN YEARS ago!
I am bitter and angry that most of the people in my hometown, home state and birth nation seem to be dumb as posts! Like the Ancient Mariner, I may continue to tell this story to every stranger I meet, even while I bless all the little live things with their fins and feathers and fur. I do not WANT to just let go of outrageous medical malpractice, nor the fact that taxicabs refused to pick us up in front of the street clinic. But I am grateful for his niece who helped me care for him, and for the mysterious stranger who first offered us a ride home and then - after all our stuff wouldn't fit into his car - somehow returned the $700 wheelchair cushion that we'd left there, though our address was not on it. (It was on the ground in front of our building the next morning.) The fact that the niece was available and eager to help was directly related to two crises in her own life, from which she needed distraction. Life is like the Chinese (?) story of the horse that ran away, returned with several mares, broke the leg of the teen son, which kept him from being drafted... and on and on. Good thing? Bad thing? I only know how I feel.
Too much positive thinking makes me want to sneak off and sit under a tree, ideally after ingesting a good psychedelic!
Hmm... I wrote about twice as much, and the second half has just disappeared. The phone rang while I was composing. Hope this isn't a duplicate post, but I retrieved the shitty first edit from my Drafts folder. I will do my best to avoid repetition!
The "positive psychology" guru, Martin Seligman, received his start-up research funding from a mysterious secret donor. The military somehow manages to co-opt everything about brain research, psychedelics, meditation, biofeedback, NLP, etc., that proves to work. Their mission is to get traumatized soldiers back onto the battlefield!
I was shocked to learn that even yoga was once used to maintain fitness for soldiers after India first won its independence. Power Yoga is perfect for thin adolescent males, and it established self-esteem, since very few British people were able to do it. One major story in the Hindu holy books involves convincing the warrior Arjuna to go into battle against his own family, despite his own moral misgivings! So I prefer gentle Hollywood New Age yoga to the original version.
Almost every famous guru has been caught up in some scandal by now. Gandhi is a revered figure for many, but he beat his wife, declared unilateral celibacy in a culture where divorce was unthinkable, and his nonviolent revolution was followed by a bloody massacre and several famines. Mother Teresa neglected her patients and gave most donation money to the Church.
The Buddha, in our own culture, would qualify as a deadbeat dad who walked away from his wife and infant to find himself. Decades later, he got tired and sat under a tree. I doubt that the family he abandoned thought he was so holy, but at least his absence caused no financial hardship. His teachings were better than most. I particularly like his advice that, if some statement offends your common sense, you must refuse to believe it, no matter who said it - even if *he* said it! You may still be wrong, but at least your reasoning begins from an honest basis.
I also like the fact that his first noble truth seems obvious to me: "Life is suffering" (or in another translation, "difficult"). Martin Seligman thinks that our emotional setpoint is largely genetic, and my dad was a unipolar depressive. His Seasonal Affective Disorder began to manifest in August - in Alabama! - and was diagnosed by his GP in the early Sixties when the condition was still almost unknown. I don't doubt neuroplasticity, since (with support from a team of psychic healers) my dad also made a full recovery from a stroke predicted to leave him a "vegetable." But he never liked to dance! :-D
My late partner was a trainer for the Living Love practices from Ken Keyes' "Handbook to Higher Consciousness." Roedy was the kindest person I ever knew. He attributed that to Living Love - but I learned from others at his Celebration of Life that he had *always* been kind, even as a child. During the 1980s Ethiopian famine, he sold his fully paid for house in Vancouver and donated the proceeds to
Oxfam and The Hunger Project. A brilliant computer programmer, he thought there'd be plenty more money where that came from. There wasn't. While working in India, he had met the Tata Industries tycoon and convinced him to bring computer technology to India. That soon put North American independent programmers out of business. Roedy didn't even have the concept of how to write a resume or seek employment - jobs had always come to him!
He had infinite patience with me, but turned into a holy terror when faced with proponents for the Iraq War. He saw all soldiers as potential child-killers! That comes with the job description.
I do appreciate the enormous amount of work that Thom has put into sharing his knowledge over the years (perseverance furthers!), because Thom knows about the Dark Side. But I seem to be the only person in this forum who has any misgivings about these Gratitude practices.
It's going on 2025 now. Our goal was to end world hunger by 1997... then 2000... then 2015... I did feel more upbeat while I still thought that was going to happen within my lifetime. The stats do look better now, but I no longer trust the stats. (See Buddha quote above.)
Dancing could still bring me joy (with the right people, to the right music), but most of what I've heard since the Seventies has not been music to my ears. Rap and hip-hop usually make me want to hit somebody! I attribute this to copyright laws and synthesizers. The latter were supposed to expand our options, not substitute for them! I'm reacting to the sound, not the lyrics. Those might offend me, too, but they're blessedly unintelligible. I guess today's youths think faster, if they can understand those words. But there's a more appalling explanation: MP3 files! Researchers have found that if you don't get to hear certain sounds when young, you will never be able to hear them. This applies to some tonal languages, and even to vowels for this Southerner ("pin" and "pen" sound exactly alike to me), but also to the nuances of music. I read one fascinating story by a man who had always heard in synaesthesia, but lost that ability after a stroke. He was helped by a variety of unlikely method, including a pair of Irlen glasses. Wearing these, even with his eyes closed, he regained his synaesthesia - but only for analogue records! They didn't work for digital music. I stopped playing recorded music when LPs and tape cassettes went away! My ear for music is not that great, so I never analyzed the difference; I just wasn't enjoying it as much. I'm not a techy, but most likely MP3s have now been replaced by recordings that capture more information, so maybe only one or two generations lost their ability to hear anything but the base rhythm. (I *can* appreciate a good live percussionist, but have heard maybe three in my lifetime.) One fast food chain during the 1990s found that they could repel the pesky teenagers hanging out in front of their stores by playing Mozart!
One of my past jobs included captioning college classes for Deaf students in real time. Computer-generated captions used to be so horrible that a Deaf person could watch a talk show without having any idea of the topic. But the new mobile phones can do such a great job of recording and transcribing that these will probably replace the human captionist - though a proofreader will still be needed. Anyhow, during the course of my work with the Deaf, I met quite a few retired musicians! No surprise there - those loudspeakers cause hearing loss. So some opted for cochlear implants. To their dismay, at first they couldn't tell whether that noise was their favourite song on the radio, or a motorcycle going past! Eventually, most learned to "hear" and enjoy musical numbers that they already knew, but anything new would always sound like noise to them. (Maybe not percussion - I haven't looked into that, but there's at least one professional Deaf percussionist.) But my dad thought that even Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" was "just noise," and I hear their work as quite melodious. Is it *that* different from the Rockabilly that my parents grew up with?
Good music is also something that I could be grateful for, but that has been largely drowned out by all the racket that I can perceive only as parent repellent. Luckily, I never had to raise any teenagers. I did play housemother to two teen roommates, but that was during the 1970s when music was great! Then came disco, which many music lovers complained about bitterly at the time. By now it sounds refreshingly melodious!
Am I done yet? I alternately enjoy and suffer from "hypergraphia." No essay is complete until I have explored the topic from all angles! People don't have much patience with that verbiage today. But I do need a launching pad, which in this case was Gratitude.
I'm extremely depressed now, which is usual for December, but worse without Roedy. But I don't dare go out and socialize at random, after seeing what Long Covid did to Roedy, and hearing about Thom's neighbours who took Thanksgiving plane trips! (Thanks for that warning, Thom. It irks me that people have become so casual about Covid, but with RFK Jr. in charge of health policy, we'll soon be getting used to ailments that had become no longer a threat.
Ironically, however, Elon Musk seems to be the *only* billionaire funding research into controlling the aging process, the most prolonged unpleasant thing that many of us will ever experience - if we don't die first! While enough elders remain to form a voting bloc, we do need to vote the grifters out of office. If the Boomer generation is indeed responsible for electing those jerks (as many young people blame us for), they are right to be angry. And that could soon translate into lack of Social Security and elder care!