Gratitude

Content Warning: this piece deals with heavy themes around mental health. If you are not in a place to read, please put this away and take care of yourself.

It occurs to me now that gratitude is a learning. It’s the practice of unfolding answers to questions like this one - when a person in Gaza lost her life, what is it that she lost? It’s that question now on a mass scale. More than 10,000 people. What was lost? If we don’t really know what is lost, how can we grieve? Their lives are dehumanized by my government and news outlets. I’m trying to understand how this dehumanization happens. I think it has something to do with the numbness of ingratitude. In that numbness we dehumanize ourselves. And life does not seem so precious or worth saving.

At the beginning of the 12th Century, Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote:

We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice

if we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.

If. If we do that. If we fall in love. The way life is now, 9 centuries later, leads me to believe that most of us didn’t. What stopped us? More productively, how can we fall in love now?

These words are like a formula. Almost like a recipe. Except a recipe has to be followed in sequential order. Here, you can enter anywhere to solve for x. There’s the passion, and the danger, and the depth, and the love, and the place of that love, and then there is that doubting “if.” I read the dullness as ingratitude, and gratitude as an education of the stuff of life.

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It’s hard to write about this. This summer I realized that I did not want to be alive. If it’s of any use, I’d like to write through the progression of thought that relieved this specific pain.

In the hospital, everyday the clinicians asked me if I had plans to harm myself. This was in the beginning of October. For as long as I can remember, way before my time in the hospital, my honest answer was yes. This is a result of a chemical imbalance in my brain and some things I’ve been through. It’s severe depression, and I’ve been battling it since I was 9. I write this for context, to explain the location from which my new understanding of gratitude arrived.

I used to think that gratitude was a veiled means of maintaining the status quo. A turning attention inwards when external circumstance required change. If I ever witnessed another’s suffering, I didn’t understand how I could be thankful that I myself was not suffering. It felt sickening, like I was not addressing the suffering actionably. Like gratitude practiced in this way was focusing on and adoring the life raft that rescued the individual, while others drowned. So I refused to be grateful for the things I feel we should all be entitled to: housing, food, basic needs. I wanted to ignore my own life and envision instead beautiful dreams of safety, love, and warm food for all. But then I was ungrateful. It turns out that in the absence of gratitude, I was desperately sad.

One of the clinicians referred to this form of gratitude as “downward comparison.” She had it printed out in a list of coping strategies, along with activities like drinking water and listening to music. I said, I think that downward comparison is this most horrible thing. How does it help me cope, how can I find refuge in the fact that I have a place to live when others do not. She scowled at me and asked, so what? I’m not allowed to be grateful for what I have? I crossed my arms and stopped talking, but I was thinking, you have nothing, absolutely nothing, until everyone everywhere is free.

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I read a chapter my friend Daniella Medina is writing about Angela Davis’s Relational Embodied politics. Daniella explains how

Davis asks us to “imagine revolutionary struggles that extend beyond our lifetime”– to know that “there is no liberation in death” and to “think of oneself collectively.”

After I read this, I went to the grocery store. I walked around the aisles in a daze, working through the contradictions present in these words. It was everything that my body felt but that my mind didn’t have the language to say. My sorrow, without my realizing it, had been so individual and lonesome. Davis’s words were my first relief. When I was in line, I remember exhaling and thinking, while I am not escaping, I might as well enjoy myself. By which I mean, when I imagined no escape from this life, I felt a new resolve to live. It’s a call to action. Our fluid stories and bodies and struggles bound up with each other, indistinguishable, like water against water.

And then in the morning when I was boiling water for coffee. My phone lit up with a block of text from a website called “Queering the Map.” The words were placed above a map, written by someone in northern Gaza:

Idk how long I will live so I just

want this to be my memory

here before I die. I am not

going to leave my home,

come what may. My biggest

regret is not kissing this one

guy. He died two days back.

We had told how much we like

each other and I was too shy

to kiss last time. He died in the

bombing. I think a big part of

me died too. And soon I will be

dead. To younus, i will kiss you

in heaven.

I gasped. This fucking life. These shy lovers. It sounds so good, the thing they lost.

And then I was sitting in my parked car when I read that the Israeli government bombed a hospital in Gaza. Grief I know in glimpses, as a weightless falling feeling. Like floating. And I was sitting in my car for two hours between the day and early evening, and I was watching fog rise off the surface of the driveway. The grief was not contained to my body, I could see that. Rising off the surface of the driveway, the world was in grief. I could almost hear it. But it was so silent in my car.

It’s in that silence that I began to understand. Gratitude is a learning.

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Simon Weil wrote:

the future is made of the same stuff as the present

It’s gratitude that gives me the space to ask, well what’s that stuff? And when I answer that, I find something so beautiful. The beauty is ineffable.

Eric O. Springsted, in summarizing Weil, wrote:

“Attention” — the suspension of one’s own self as the center of the world and a making oneself available to the reality of another being, is the key both to prayer and justice.

Gratitude, then, is learning to pay attention to life. Like a bowl of olives. Let’s say they are from Palestine. They taste like presence, like being awake, like vigorously awake. Tears so salty. You are eating them in your friend’s kitchen. You are waiting for her there. She barges in without knocking, and embraces you in her arms even though she sees you every day. You stand. I am talking about a collection of moments. The olives come from the olive trees. They take 40 years to fruit. The Israeli government is destroying the Palestinian olive trees, and this genocide did not begin in October. What they destroy is a collection of moments.

Weil also:

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him:

“What are you going through?”

The question is the beginning of the learning. I mean, I can’t know what the shy lovers lost. Their life is not my life. Gratitude now seems to me like the impossible task of understanding. It is impossible, I will continue to try, and so live.

It is imperative that I love my life if there is a chance that someone somewhere loved their own. That way, I will know the weight of it. I pray that we will love our lives with such depth that we will make this earth a place to live.

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This is from On Living by Nazim Hikmet:

I mean, you must take living so seriously

that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant

olive trees—

and not for your children, either,

but because although you fear death you don’t

believe it,

because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

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I’m sitting in my best friend’s house. She was out when I arrived. The door was locked and she knocked and yelled my name. I ran to open it and she embraced me like she hadn’t seen me in a long time, but I think she saw me yesterday. Before we even had a chance to catch up, she hugged me again.

Liberation now. Ceasefire now. Free Palestine.