Gratitude as Honesty

It's often the case that the virtues we try to practice support, reflect, and blend in with one another. There's a sort of wholeness or resemblance among the family of virtues. Sometimes being courageous means practicing humility. Other times being charitable means having patience. Today I want to talk about how two of my favorite virtues intertwine, but before I can get to that, we'll have to lay out some metaphysics. 

There are two types of people. First there are those that believe the Earth is essentially a good place. That the world has been designed and built for human beings to inhabit, or that it's at least a homey and valuable habitat for us humans. However despite the world being essentially good, due to our vices, sin, chance, physics, etc. what is good about the world is also plagued with evil. Death, destruction, exploitation, what have you. 

Then there are those who believe the universe is, at best, indifferent to our presence and completely neutral in regard to our human dramas and crises, and at worst, an actively hostile place. Essentially bad, brutal, violent - albeit with a few glimmering rays of good things here and there. 

I am of the former group. There is a lot of rottenness in the world, but at bottom I believe that we live in a good place, that what is good can and will be redeemed of the bad. I believe not only that God is - but that he is for us, rather than against us.

Now, if you'll indulge me a little more philosophy here, if you believe that the world is a good place - that we humans make our homes here in reality, and that what is real is good for us - than it follows that the truth is a good thing for us to know. If the way things really are is good, then we have no need for deception or falsehood. It's the man who lives in the shack who wants to pretend that he lives in a palace, not the man in the mansion house.

If you're an existentialist, you'll probably think something opposite. That the truth is actually too awful and meaningless for us poor folk to bear, and that it's better to live under a happy illusion without too much regard for what Truth or Reality is really about. That we actually all live in the slums, so we'd best get good at pretending we don't.

I'm not an existentialist, so let's get to the point: Gratitude is simply recognizing and accepting what we already know to be true, and believing that that truth is good for us. Namely, the truth that everything we have ever had is a gift; that we've really done nothing to deserve anything we get.

If you believe in God, this should be easy to swallow more or less. Our lives, our health, our friends, family, skills, memories, possessions, our very breath, - everything good is faithfully provided by the creator of everything. Gratitude is simply keeping this truth at the forefront of your mind each and every moment of each and every day. Cake.

If you don't believe in God, this truth should be even easier to get a grip around. "Now wait just a minute," my fine existentialist says, "Well I've got my job here as a clerk at the Barnes and Noble, a job I got by filling out an application with my own pen in my own hand. I earned this job because of the work that I put into making myself attractive to employers." Slow down there, Sartre. You may have put the pen to paper, but that's only because some years ago, some sweet tired lady made you write, "The cat sat on the mat" over and over again. And that lady was there because some folks way back decided they needed a lady to teach their little squirts how to write "The cat sat on the mat" and so they set up a fund and a committee and all manner of other things until everybody around knew exactly where the cat sat, and that we've all got to get that paycheck so we can buy our soup. 

Someone taught you how to fill out an application. Someone taught you that it's good to have a job. Someone gave you the notion that if you work hard you'll be happier. Someone gave you money to buy pens with.

Everything that you might claim as your own, your job, your skills, your effort, your money, your relationships, your beliefs, the jokes you tell, the blogs you write, the fields you till, the decisions you make, the pants you wear - Everything. They all have causes and conditions that came into place long before you were conceived. And these things were only brought about because you happened to be in the right place, at the right time, made the right choices, based on the beliefs that other people taught you. It is only through the merest effort on your part that you have anything you have. And even the effort that you did expend was given to you, because somebody somewhere taught you that it's good for you to show up and work hard every once in awhile. The existentialist may not have a God to say thanks to, or even an individual person, but he can still admit that the good things in his life came out of something he had, at best, very little control over.

And that's what Gratitude is. It's about admitting that your along for the ride by the grace of God or chance. Like so many virtues, the difference between Gratitude and Honesty is seamless. Grateful people are honest people. They can have their lives stripped from them and still be ok, because they recognize the truth - that they didn't really do much to earn it to begin with. 

And if you're like me, you know that this is good. The truth is healthy for us to know, and we thrive on the way the world actually is. We function better, because we have an accurate picture of our place in the universe. 

In other words, once you realize that what you have has been given to you, it's easier to be grateful for it. It's also harder to get bent out of shape when something doesn't go your way, because you recognize that the hours you have are a gift. You've simply been put temporarily in charge of them.

So the next time you do something you enjoy, you bite into a fresh pear, you throw a strike while bowling, you have a beer with your friends - take a minute to think of all the mediating variables that had to occur in order to bring that situation about. Think about the farmer who planted the seed, that grew the corn, that was picked by the migrant worker, then shipped to that factory in Tacoma, mashed by a machine built in Detroit, baked and shipped to the kitchen, and then put in a little bowl and brought out to you by Amber at the La Comida. Think of the hundred year old pine that was felled by Ron in Alberta, then treated at the plant, driven on a truck by a man who just had a baby girl, cut and shaped by the craftsman in Boise, meticulously painted white and red by Jorge, boxed, shipped, unloaded, and set on the bowling alley floor to wait years and years for your ball to come rolling down the lane.

 Take a moment to savor the improbable truth of everything around you, and like adding the right spices to a meal, Gratitude will serve to refine and deepen the pleasure of your life.