Notes on gratitude and surrender

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude lately.

I am blessed in a great many ways. To name just a few, I am healthy, safe, and comfortable. I love and am loved. I am the master of my own time¹. These alone put me among the ranks of the most fortunate people in the world, and therefore, surely, among the most grateful.

Well, it pains me to admit this to you, but I am not as grateful as would seem commensurate with the scale of my blessings. Instead, when I gaze upon my lot in life, I notice feelings of lack, insecurity, craving and resentment. I still have many bones to pick with the universe for not making itself align more perfectly with my obviously correct preferences.

Since I’m sufficiently self-aware and well-socialised to know for sure (tongue firmly in cheek) that those where-gratitude-really-ought-to-have-been feelings are ugly, unwarranted and inappropriate, I also get a side order of shame about the whole affair, which makes me want to turn away from exploring further what’s going on.

So, when it was recently pointed out to me that the cure for my self-diagnosed condition of chronic stuckness might in fact be gratitude, I decided to take a closer look.

There have been some sublime moments in my life where, due to whatever confluence of factors, I have felt a supreme, abiding and unconflicted gratitude for whatever my attention landed on. Such experiences have been telling in both their power and rarity, because they revealed that the experience of gratitude is a wide spectrum, and most of the time I’m a long way from what’s possible.

On the one hand, gratitude can be merely perfunctory; spoken, but not felt, like I’m a child being forced to apologise for something I don’t think I did wrong. Yet on the other hand, gratitude can be felt as an infinite pool of surrender and joy, where every fibre of my being unfolds in the flawless presence of the way things are. These are states so profound that I have to make do with stringing words together to gesture vaguely at a level of gratitude that is no really completely pure and earnest and sincere and true and actually full gratitude though.

If it’s true that gratitude can be so sublime, and that I’m not feeling such a level of gratitude most of the time, there must be some resistance to it. What is behind that resistance?

To feel and express that kind of sincere gratitude is to accept, at a depth that at first feels disturbing, that my blessings in life are not entirely of my own design, as much as I may want to cling to the illusion that they are. Sure, I may work hard, make good decisions, be educated, talented and skilled (not to mention devastatingly handsome), but many people do, have and are those things, and they are not as fortunate as I am. Similarly, I am less fortunate than many who may be less seemingly ‘deserving’ than I am.

I may be able to encourage blessings in my life, to create the conditions where blessings show up more readily, but ultimately I’m not the final arbiter of the good that happens to me. That I have never been in a car crash is a testament both to my capacity to drive carefully and to my good fortune to never have had negligent, impaired or evil drivers nullify my best efforts.

To be more poetic about it, it’s as though my blessings flow into my life through a channel from some heavenly realm and there’s a kind of energetic exchange involved: the heavenly realm offers me blessings, and I offer a bright, pure gratitude in return, to balance the books.

To push the metaphor further, my experience over not just the last few years, but my entire life, suggests that the channel from that heavenly realm passes close to, or perhaps through, some less wholesome realms. That return flow of gratitude through the channel is not just a fair exchange for the blessings I receive, it plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the channel itself. Without gratitude, its edges become ragged and permeable, bringing smiles to the faces of any demons that lurk just outside it, allowing them to enter the channel, and so, my life. bringing with them resentment, disconnection and anxiety. They make me forget that I’m not in charge of the blessings I receive.

And it does seem that whatever lingering stuckness I experience is a symptom of clinging to the belief that I am, in fact, in charge. If I am the architect and master builder of the grand edifice I stand upon, I bear the full burden of responsibility for them. A poor decision, enemies at the gates, or a powerful storm may bring it all crashing down, so I tense my body and mind into whatever shapes they need to take to prevent that from happening. There is no rest here, except perhaps when I myself turn to dust.

The alternative is to surrender control. This is not to say that I am absolved of the need to work hard, to be invested in life, or to throw myself wholeheartedly and earnestly into whatever it is that life offers me. Indeed, the attitude of not just going with the flow, but surrendering into the flow is the means whereby life is actually able to unfold for me. Asserting that I’m the master of where I go is just struggling against the flow. In some cases, perhaps, it might work at great cost, but in most cases I’m likely to exhaust myself and get nowhere. ²

It reminds me of this story from Carl Jung, which I can’t find myself, but the Internet assures me he did actually say:

“Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days whereas nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough.” – Carl Jung

To feel that pure, all-embracing gratitude is, in its own way, to bow low before God, so low that my sense of separation from the ground I emerged from breaks down and I remember my place within the interwovenness of all things.

Gratitude is a sacred expression of humility. I know that when I struggle to access it, I need only look to my own grasping for control to find the cause. To truly let in the gratitude for the fact that I have never been hit by a car is to look unflinchingly at the parallel world in which I was, allow my heart to break and to see that the gap between his life and mine may be as small as a single well-timed glance—from someone else.