“There was in all living things something limpid and joyous—like the wet, morning call of the birds, flying up through the unstained atmosphere.” —Willa Cather
“Give thanks for unknown blessings that are already on their way.” —Native American prayer
In high school, I struggled through Boris Pasternak’s famous novel Doctor Zhivago. This book had an enormous cast of characters and the long Russian names seemed impossible to keep straight. But I took notes on the names and nicknames and eventually Doctor Zhivago amazed me. I underlined parts of almost every page and wrote down countless quotes to memorize.
These last few years, I’ve been rereading all my favorite classics, most of which I read decades ago. When I reread Pasternak’s book last year, I understood that it had shaped the way I have lived.
Dr. Zhivago was a good man in a terrible time and place. He tried to be kind to everyone and offer hope to others regardless of circumstance. He felt great passion and love for the world, especially the world of family, books, and nature. He was swept up by swells of gratitude for whatever kindness or grace was offered to him. But most important, in terms of his influence on me, he always was on a search for beauty.
When he was crammed into a freezing train car, hungry and exhausted, returning home from the front during World War I, he focused on the beautiful scent of linden tree blossoms. At the end, as he rode slowly across Moscow to a doctor’s appointment, he suffered a heart attack. He kept his attention on the shimmering violet dress of a woman walking on the sidewalk.
I learned from Pasternak that we can always create a moment in which we are flooded by beauty and that the more desperate the times, the more important it is that we seek this kind of moment. That knowledge has saved me over and over again and become an important part of who I am. It is perhaps my best coping tool.
As we age, we tend to improve our gratitude skills. Through trial and error learning, we know that if we focus on the good and positive, we see ourselves as lucky. Whereas, when we focus on grievances, past pains, regrets, and disappointments, we can make ourselves feel unlucky and miserable. Also, we are likely to have experienced sad events that propelled us toward gratitude as a means of psychic survival.
Gratitude is a life skill that can be improved with practice. Even during the toughest trials, we can learn to find things to enjoy and appreciate. I don’t mean to imply that we can manage to be grateful every moment. That would be an unrealistic demand on ourselves. Feeling grateful is not a moral injunction, but rather, a healthy habit that we can learn to employ with greater frequency.
• • •
We can’t always rise to the occasion. One morning, Emma woke with a bad flu and an eye infection. Outside a dense fog covered her garden and the trees beyond. She thought, “I’m in the same dense fog that I see outside.”
Chris came in to see if she was okay and she moaned, “No, no, no.”
He offered to rub her back or make her some hot cider and she shook her head. He asked if she wanted him to stay home from work and she said, “Just leave me alone. It hurts to talk.” He tried to kiss her goodbye but she waved him away.
Everything hurt and Emma could hardly think. She felt so sick that she stupidly wished she could die. That morning the whole world was the color of cement.
Emma wisely gave herself a day off from feeling grateful and kindhearted and just lay around moaning. But the next morning, when she felt a little better, she pushed herself to remember what was good in her life. When Chris brought her tea, she appreciated its warmth and minty flavor. She gave him a kiss, nibbled on his ear, and, when he laughed, she laughed too.
• • •
Dr. Robert Emmons at the University of California, Davis, worked with transplant patients. In his study, two groups were asked to record their feelings about life. One group was instructed to add a daily list of five things or people they were grateful for. After twenty-one days, the gratitude list group had improved their scores on measures of positive adjustment and well-being. Both of these measures had declined for people who had not been asked to keep track of what they were grateful for.
Gratitude doesn’t correlate with circumstance. In fact, it’s been my experience that women with the worst luck tend to have the strongest gratitude skills. Muriel’s mother is an example of this.
Muriel flew across the country to be with her mother as she lay dying in an ICU. Her mother slept almost all the time, but she wasn’t in pain. Her breathing was labored and she could no longer eat or drink on her own. Most days Muriel simply sat holding her mother’s hand and thinking about her mother’s long sad history.
Her mother had been orphaned young and worked as a live-in housekeeper in her early teens. She later married an abusive man who abandoned her after their third child was born. With only an eighth-grade education, she earned her living cleaning hotel rooms and cooking for greasy spoon restaurants.
Muriel wished she’d had time and money to take her mother on a beach vacation. She tried unsuccessfully to remember one luxury her mother had ever enjoyed. All she could recall was her own dance recitals from fifty years ago. Her mother had loved attending those. Just then her mother woke with a start. She put her hands on either side of Muriel’s face and pulled her in close—eye to eye. She told Muriel, “I have had a wonderful life. Remember that.”
Her mother fell back onto the pillow asleep and, by the next morning, she was gone. Muriel realized her mother condensed everything she knew about life in that one sentence. She determined that she would hold it in her heart and work to become more grateful.
Many women I know actively cultivate gratitude. Margie sends her friends frequent emails in which her entire topic is what she has enjoyed and appreciated that day. Gretchen keeps a gratitude journal and writes down that which delights her. Some of us challenge each other to have the longest gratitude lists at the end of the day.
We can remind ourselves every morning that we have the gift of life and that we can attend to that which is loving, touching, or beautiful.
We can say grace before meals, just to thank the universe for giving us our bread and fruit.
My former editor Jane feels grateful whenever she walks into an art gallery. The work is sacred to her. It reminds her of the best that we humans offer each other. Birdsong is my temple bell. I try to remember when I hear birds singing to breathe deeply and appreciate what is around me.
When we can appreciate the smallest of gifts, we are wise women. The great ecstatic Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen was said to be so grateful for the gift of a sardine that she wept.
Ironically, tragedy often catapults people toward gratitude whereas constant good fortune can actually make it hard to feel grateful. Privileged people may habituate to a comfortable, easy life. Small problems engender big complaints. For example, “Oh no, my flight to Paris has been changed and I now have a four-hour layover in Chicago” or “The landscaper can’t come until next week and nothing will look right for our party.”
However, when we lose a beloved, our salvation is to remember with gratitude the joys of that relationship. We feel grateful, not in spite of problems, but because of them. For example, my friend Jan was telling me how much she missed her distant grandchildren. Then she stopped herself and sighed. She shook off her pain mid-sentence by saying, “Life is so complicated, but so damn good.”
At a musical event at a Lutheran church, I watched an elderly woman in an electric mobility scooter. She had a full-body brace and wore a purple shirt, flowery print skirt, and white socks. In spite of her obvious hardships, she was grinning as she swayed and danced in her chair while singing loudly, “You Are My Sunshine.”
My recently widowed neighbor actively sought out joy and gratitude by visiting a pet store. She would stand and watch the baby ferrets play, then enjoy the soothing movements of multicolored tropical fish. Sometimes she held a kitten that was awaiting adoption. By the time she left the pet store she always felt happy to be alive in such a sweet world.
Recognizing our own contentment is an undervalued skill. Intense passion and excitement grab our attention, but contentment whispers in ways we may not notice. In fact, contentment is a basic building block of a happy life. When we are content, we can say, “Notice this. This is good.”
Vicki Robin wrote, “We need to slow people down to the speed of wisdom.” “Slow down,” admonishes my brother Jake. He says, “The slower you travel the more you see. When you give up speed, you open up time.”
I attended a silent retreat where we chewed each bite at least thirty times before swallowing. That weekend, chewing was such hard work that I left the table hungry. However, I found myself loving the rather bland food of the monastery. Finally, I had time to notice and appreciate every good flavor. I had always hated oatmeal but I found myself looking forward to my morning bowl of oats and thinking, “Who knew oatmeal could be so nutty and filled with flavor?”
From this retreat I learned that doing things slowly and paying attention makes them much more enjoyable. Time expands, the senses are awakened, and everything feels more spacious and free. Ever since then, when I eat a piece of chocolate or drink a cup of good coffee, I try to notice how much I like it.
All of us can find ourselves in “airplane mode,” just floating along inattentive to everything around us. But if we learn the skill of waking ourselves up and savoring life, the present can be a great joy.
Yesterday, I attended the memorial service of an old friend. Later I worked in my garden, where all the rosebushes were in glorious bloom. In my prairie flower bed, the red poppies saluted. I examined golf ball–size tomatoes and picked basil for pesto. And, just as the sun set, a meadowlark sang from the top of our masthead tree. The last of the sun’s rays illuminated its yellow breast as it called out, “We are alive. Be grateful.”
Sally has experienced a more difficult life than most of us. She comes from a complicated family with more than her share of poverty, loss, and health problems. She manages chronic pain and she is frequently seriously ill. Yet she exudes gratitude.
The most cheerful people I’ve ever known were the ones with the greatest hardships. I remember Alma from my book Another Country. She was caring for her sixty-year-old daughter, who had been profoundly brain-damaged at birth and who never learned to walk, talk, or feed herself. Alma was the only person I ever met who was brave enough to put a whoopee cushion under me and to cackle with amusement when I tooted and blushed. She often had parties at her place because her daughter couldn’t leave home and she had so many visitors that it was hard to fit in my interviews. I always left her home feeling better. She could make me laugh when no one else could.
When I arrived for an interview, Sally greeted me at the screen door in her wheelchair. She gave me a big hug and invited me into her kitchen for tea. She has curly black hair, freckles, and a warm smile. Because both her arms are weak, I poured the tea and carried the pot to the table. She told me she was excited for our interview. She said, “Getting old is such a freaking privilege!”
Sally has a small older house on a tree-lined street. Her home is filled with books, art, and music. She plays soul music on her radio and keeps a James Beard cookbook and the Colorado Review on her kitchen table. We drank our tea out of old china cups, with antique silver cream and sugar holders nearby. Sally had just baked bread, which she served with Irish butter. She winked and said, “I can afford the luxury of Irish butter.”
Her son, Sean, is currently in Colorado helping a progressive candidate run for the Senate. Sean is a burly, talkative guy who has worked as a prison guard and as a community organizer. Whenever Sean is around on my visits to Sally’s place, I find myself rather startled by his combination of grittiness, intelligence, curse words, and kindness.
Sally lives on her retirement pension and disability. She told me that she felt she was already in her ninth life, with her most recent near-death experience occurring only a few months earlier. At that time, her hemoglobin dropped precipitously and she was admitted to the hospital’s ICU. When we met, she was just recovering from this medical crisis, but she has had many others, including a serious strep infection that had caused her entire body to go septic. This infection not only nearly killed her, but left her body paralyzed from the waist down.
After a long hospitalization, Sally lived for months in a nursing home in a small town near Lincoln. She had been isolated and wasn’t receiving adequate care. She had been in so much pain that she could barely tolerate being covered by a shawl “woven out of spider webs.” She had been sure she would die in that nursing home, but instead she was rescued by a nurse advocate who arranged for her to transfer to a hospital for better care.
Eventually Sally was able to return to Lincoln. Her friends helped her do the things she couldn’t do for herself, and Sean, then in college, moved back home to care for her. He stayed with her for more than a year.
Before her health problems, Sally had lived a big life. She enjoyed international travel, had been married three times, and had many careers—running a restaurant, teaching, and writing. Over her lifetime, she has won literary awards and been a community activist. Recently she wrote the history of the Farmers Union of Nebraska. Now, one step at a time, Sally is reassembling her life. She consults with government officials about some of her professional specialties: agriculture, rural development, and global climate change.
Sally possesses the great gift of positive spin. Even her disabilities could be crafted into resplendent narratives. She said, “I enjoy the challenge of learning new ways to do things. It is a creative form of problem solving. As for my life, I have enough. I’ll never be wealthy, but compared to the people all over the earth who live on two dollars a day, I’m a millionaire.”
Sally was sixty-four and, when I asked if she saw herself as old, she said, “Yes. When I look in the mirror I see my grandmother. But it doesn’t bother me because I loved her so much.”
She told me she had acquired many survival tools. She was more empathic, but could also draw lines between herself and others for self-protection. As she put it, “I know the difference between you and me.”
She was honest with herself. “I used to not know what to do with conflicting wants and needs, but now I have the ability to live within complexity,” she explained.
“I am resilient. I don’t panic when things go wrong,” said Sally. She attributed this to her basic nature, but also to the twelve-step programs for adult children of alcoholics she participated in. Sally’s mother was an alcoholic, and as an adult, Sally benefited from talking about the effects of her childhood.
Sally is not afraid of death. Having been near death many times, she knows that as death approaches most people feel too sick and miserable to be worried about dying. She believes what we all fear most is what she calls “psychic dismemberment,” which is the loss of our identity, our ways of thinking, and our sense of self.
She recalled a dream she had as a nine-year-old. An aunt who had died of a stroke came to her in this dream and told her that people are not as afraid of death as they are of being forgotten. But, this aunt said, people are not forgotten. Rather their lives are like a flowered cloth that slowly fades. The pattern of their life remains on all the people they affected.
Sally helped her father through the dying process and made sure he felt as little pain as possible. A few minutes before his death, she and her stepsister were sitting beside him, talking about an old family friend. At the time, her father seemed comatose and they didn’t think he could hear them. They were trying to remember the name of this old friend when her father said his name. He died peacefully right afterwards. Sally said that after that incident she always assumed that comatose people could hear and, in their presence, she made sure to be positive and loving.
Sally told me about one of her near-death experiences. She was embarrassed to tell the story because it sounded like something out of Reader’s Digest. As Sally approached death, she saw light and the approaching shadows of people she knew who had died. When she was resuscitated, Sally was annoyed, because “Being almost dead was one of the most interesting experiences I ever had.”
Still, Sally isn’t sure what happens after we die. She believes we come from a great ocean and will return to it. We are connected to everything forever. Matter and energy are never lost. She laughed and said, “I am not sure whether we will be waves or particles but in some form or another we will go on.”
Sally’s idea of how she would like to be buried fits her quirky personality. As is the practice of certain Native peoples in our area, she would like a sky burial on the roof of her house so that the turkey vultures in her neighborhood can have a feast in her honor. But she and her son agreed that the neighbors might not like this. Her second choice was to simply be buried beside the tree in her backyard, but that’s against the law. So she probably will be cremated.
The day of our interview, the sky was blue, the lilacs were blooming, and the grass was emerald green from a recent rain. Sally was feeling healthy at the moment. “Whenever I’m outside, I’m happy to be alive,” Sally exclaimed. She mentioned seeing a small worm that morning on a plant and watching it quickly wriggle into the grass. She laughed, “It was in that worm’s nature to be resilient, just like it is in mine.”
Sally is almost too good to be true and most of us cannot rise to her empyrean heights of gratitude. However, I feel lucky to have met her. She still has a big life. Sally helped me put my problems in perspective. If Sally can be cheerful carrying the burden she does, then surely I can manage to be grateful and cheerful too.