Jim: Etty Hillesum's Gratitude

I certainly didn't intend to begin my contributions to this blog on gratitude by quoting from books, but just today I encountered another passage apropos to this topic, and can't resist sharing it. Again, its David Brooks, and this time he quotes from the diary of a Dutch woman, Etty Hillesum, born at the brink of the first World War. On the cusp of that war's terrible successor, Hillesum, never before a religious practitioner, finds herself falling into a life of prayer. Prayer, she finds, is a way for her to make peace with her vulnerabilty and an intimate opportunity to practice gratitude. Before she knows it, a desire to practice prayer for these reasons becomes a compulsion that may come over her in an moment. Gratitude, she finds, is transformational.

No longer [do] I want this or that, but: Life is great and good and fascinating and eternal, and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty eternal current that is life. It is in these moments--and I am so grateful for them-- that all personal ambition drops away from me, and that my thirst for knowledge and understanding comes to rest, and a small piece of eternity descends on me with a sweeping wingbeat.

I am so grateful for Hillesum's words this morning, as I feel like they are speaking directly to me. I too feel distant from a religious practice that would provide me with the call and the structure to practice daily gratitude. I too am far too often carried away for hours, days, weeks by "my thirst for knowledge and understanding;" I too "flounder and fluff about." My wife, a proud intravert, recently told me that I live my interior life more intensely than anyone she's ever known, herself included-- and I don't even consider myself full-fledged intravert.  All that said, I have been fortunate enough, as I was earlier this morning, to experience Hillesum's "small piece of eternity" when I give it space to do so. I come away from that experience like someone whose first bite of food after a long fast punctuates their hunger. Sounds dramatic, I know, but that is what it felt like.

I am grateful for convenient ways to quickly be surrounded by the "good and fascinating and eternal," as I had this morning walking the MKT trail here in Columbia, an early rails-to-trails conversion success story. The trail was championed by former Columbia Mayor Darwin Hindman, who passed away just last week, and whose efforts, along with others, made possible a true jewel of a natural, public resource. As I walked one of the many portions of the trail that runs straight and seemingly endlessly through a tree-lined, arched canopy, filtering the sun's light through it like an arboreal Sainte Chapelle, I felt that urge that Hillesum describes. For her, the body's folds and articulations reveal how it is "made for prayer", and I found myself thinking about how often I assume that the most beautiful places in the world are far away and rarely, if ever, achievable.

So I'm grateful for today's insight: that gratitude's pull is so powerful, that the opportunities it presents are so omnipresent when one takes even a moment to look for them, and that its powers, like life's "mighty eternal current,"  are so transformational when indulged, that it need only capture you once, on a trail walk in summer's early days, to remind you of how much it belongs in your life.

Jim: Dostoyevsky's Gratitude

I just started reading David Brooks's new book The Two Mountains, and its good enough that I have forgotten at times that he is the NY Times opinion writer and NPR contributor that I thought long ago I had lost any interest in. Who knew? In a discussion about the power of gratitude, he shares the story of the moment in which Fyodor Dostoyevsky experienced one of the most profound gratitudes ever recorded in literature. Here is the story:

"[Dostoyevsky] had been imprisoned in Saint Petersburg with a group of other revolutionaries and sentenced to die. The men were marched out into a square in their burial shrouds. The firing squad gathered, and the drums sounded. Death was seconds away. Then, at that instant, by prearranged plan, a messenger arrived on horseback. The execution was to be stayed by the clemency of the czar. The original sentences would apply-- hard labor.

One man broke down crying, singing out loud, 'Long live the czar!' Another went mad. Dostoyevsky was brought back to his cell and suddenly was overcome with joy. 'I cannot recall when I was ever as happy as on that day,' he later recalled. 'I walked up and down my cell ... and sang the whole time, sand at the top of my voice, so happy at being given back my life.'

He immediately wrote to his brother: 'And only then did I know how much I loved you my dear brother!' All the small questions that used to concern him fell away. 'When I look back on my past and think how much I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-- then my heart bleeds.'

His life, he felt, would begin again. 'Never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now . . . Now my life will change. I shall be born again in a new form ... Life is a gift. Life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness . . . Life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not in the exterior.'"

For me, this passage is a master class in gratitude, addressing why it is important, what it makes possible, how it is linked to other crucial emotional habits like forgiveness, reflection,  expressions of love. Dostoyevsky also reminds us that the practice of gratitude is a decision as much as it is a reaction, and one may exercise to salvage situations that might otherwise foster resentment.

I read the czar's treatment of Dostoyevsky and the rest of the prisoners as manipulation (recall that the sparing of their lives was the czar's intention all along) not clemency. Regardless, it's hard to look on (let alone find) the bright side of a sentence of hard labor. Clearly, Dostoyevsky's decision to see his new chance at life as a gift not only saved his sanity, it became a transformative experience in his life. One might even infer that Dostoyevsky's life was made better for this entire experience.

If I can use gratitude to change my life in ways that snatch happiness from the jaws of despair, then I'll have even more to be thankful for. It will, I know, take practice.