Making Gratitude Real

[This article originally appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of Unity Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.]

How a number two pencil became a magic wand that broke one spell and cast another

 I had to do something. I had to change my mind. I couldn’t keep trudging down the same tired road, stuck like water in a channel it did not choose. I needed to dig a new channel. But I couldn’t find the shovel.

Simply scolding myself to think new thoughts didn’t help. Habitual conditioning doesn’t break that easily.

I needed to take action.

I began to keep a gratitude journal.

Every morning for a year I got up and sat with my blank book and a pencil. I’d write, “I’m grateful for…” and wait. Sometimes it took a while. But I always came up with something. Even if I didn’t really feel it, I wrote it anyway. Action precedes internal transformation.

I often wrote about the same things – my wife, my work, my home. And sometimes fleeting moments crept in – the color of the sky, a hovering hummingbird, the smell of French onion soup.

Some days it was easy. Some days it was hard. But a certain tenacity, a stubborn doggedness took hold. I was not going to screw this up. My ego was on the line. Hey, whatever it takes.

After a few weeks something began to shift. I began to look forward to my morning writing. It was a chance to testify, to tell the simple truth about the life I live, to proclaim and record the evidence that life has infinite value and is fleshed out with a beauty that takes your breath away. It is surprisingly not often that one gets to say true things. It’s generally frowned upon in polite conversation. People look at you like you’re drunk.

Then a few months later I began to notice a subtler, deeper shift. The daily practice of writing concrete examples of gratitude made me look at my experiences through different eyes. As I went through my day I scanned the periphery like a predator for beauty, grace, and the generosity of the world, you know, things to be grateful for. Knowing that I had a writing assignment due in a few hours, I stayed vigilant, eyes wide for bounty. And do you know what happens when you look for something? You find it.

This is the secret power of the gratitude journal. In the end, the journal doesn’t matter. It’s just the leavings after the feast. It’s not the product, it’s the process that changes you. The gratitude journal is simply a device, a shovel for digging a new channel through which the restless mind can flow.

Before I began keeping a gratitude journal I passed the hours in worry and fear, convinced that I had to guard against the inevitable onslaughts of an uncaring world and navigate a sea of vaguely dangerous human beings all working at cross purposes. It was stressful. After keeping a gratitude journal for a year these old habits of thought were reprogrammed. The scales fell from my eyes and I began to see the world as a field of infinite possibility, a beneficent, nourishing, beautiful home filled with creative people all working toward the good as best they understood it.

I didn’t change the world. I changed the way I saw the world.

And then the final, subtlest and most important shift occurred. An insight arose from the marrow of my bones. In the authority of my own experience I came to know something I had previously only suspected, or read about second-hand in the world’s great spiritual classics, like Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I came to know that I was one with the sacred source of all things, an integral member of an interconnected web of being. I made peace with paradox and declared an everlasting armistice with myself. My conflicted confusion gave way to confident serenity. My grimace of anxiety gave way to a smile. I began to laugh more easily and cry more deeply. The light returned to my eyes. I let go of the need to control, a need born of the fear that there is never enough. I came home to myself, and found that it was a pretty good place to live.

Who knew that a pencil and a piece of paper could do all of that?

Yelp Yourself

My BFF Steve Morton and I used to play a lot of music together. After one sparsely attended coffee house gig many years ago a guy in the audience came up to us and said, “Man, you guys got balls.” To this day I still don’t know if he meant it favorably, as in, Wow, it takes courage to get on stage and I admire you for that, or, if he meant God that was awful and how dare you. Learning how to be a performer is hard. But the hardest thing by far is learning how to navigate audience feedback.

Every performer knows that the only people who come up and talk to you after a show are people who really liked what you did. Therefore, their opinions give you a false sense of awesomeness. None of the people who were bored or underwhelmed bothered to bring that to your attention.

The same dynamic holds true for writers, teachers, and artists of all stripes. Compliments come your way far more readily than rebukes. People who don’t like your stuff just ignore you. If you want to improve, you have to be your own harshest critic. You can’t really trust what people say, especially in the early years. Your friends and family just want to encourage you. “Great set,” they say. “Good job.” Thank them for their support, but don’t believe a word of it.

And then along came social media.

Everything changed.

Now everybody really is a critic.

In the digital anonymity of the Age of Yelp every tiny flaw is photographed, videotaped, and posted for all to see alongside scathing essays articulating the myriad ways you suck.

But Yelp isn’t all bad. It’s been a great help to me, especially when I travel. It quickly lets you sort through a long list of local restaurants and hone in on the best. You can’t trust those guidebooks in the hotel room – they’re just paid ads. Yelp, on the other hand, is beyond the reach of the chamber of commerce, much to their horror. Businesses live in fear of Yelp, and rightly so. Yelp is nothing more than the hive-mind reacting immediately and without filter.

It’s funny to watch some restaurant owners log on and try to respond to critics. Some take a conciliatory tone and apologize for the negative experience, vowing to improve. To me, that’s a good sign. Others launch into open combat, attacking their critics. I tend to stay away from those places.

Maybe it isn’t so complicated. If you’re a restaurant and you serve thoughtful, well-prepared, flavorful, creative, wholesome food of any genre in a clean, beautiful, fun environment staffed by decent, kind, attentive employees your Yelp reviews will be golden. If your restaurant smells like wet gym socks, you serve (gasp) canned refried beans and you haven’t changed the oil in your deep fryer since the Bush administration, people are going to talk.

It’s the same with songwriting, painting, poetry or any creative endeavor – bring together the right elements, put in the years of disciplined training, work hard every day and learn to trust yourself. No song, or plate of food, is going to please everyone. But if it’s good, it will find an appreciative palate.

And what about the naysayers? What about those bold, opinionated folks who feel the need to point out all of the ways your work falls short?

Give them a moment of your attention. Take in their criticism. They may be pointing out a weakness to which you were blind – a weakness that needs correcting. But bear in mind that no opinion, no matter how well articulated, is a fact. Sometimes critics know more than you and their observations help steer you toward higher quality output. Other times they are simply using your work as a sounding board, an opportunity to demonstrate their cleverness and alleged superiority. It takes great skill to navigate the hurtful assessments levied against us by our most vocal critics. Have the courage to listen. But don’t linger. Let it roll off your back like water off a duck.

In the end, it is we who must decide what good means. And we have to take full responsibility for working diligently to achieve it. Creating anything means you will be misunderstood. The only way to avoid being misconstrued or criticized is to produce nothing. Sit on your bed, don’t move, don’t say a word and don’t create anything. Oh wait. Somebody will probably criticize you for that too. Damn. Turns out there is no way to avoid negative criticism. So what the hell – might as well create something.

The process of giving birth is always painful. It’s bloody and it’s messy. The newborn thing is unformed, indeterminate, and waiting to be molded by a thousand different internal and external factors. Yet we can’t stop making things. It’s what we do. It’s who we are. We use these hands with these opposable thumbs and these minds and these hearts to fashion new works from the raw materials around us, wrought with the hammer, anvil and fire of our own experience. How can you not be hurt a little when someone thinks your baby is ugly? And yet you’re head over heels in love with it anyway. You nurture it, and draw sustenance from the conviction that somehow, someway, the world will be just a tiny bit better off because this thing was born. This faith, this naïve confidence, is easily misconstrued as arrogance or Narcissism. But don’t let that stop you. If you have something to say, say it. Don’t let the naysayers in the peanut gallery shush you. If someone unfairly criticizes your album, your restaurant, your book or your painting, just say, “Thank you. Can’t wait to hear your album, taste your food, read your book or see your painting.” Creativity is courageous, criticism is cowardly. It’s easy to sit on the bench, not play and criticize the players.

So all this new social media isn’t really new after all. Open forums like Yelp and Facebook simply give voice to what were formally private thoughts and impressions. As creators, as artists, as restaurateurs, we have to turn this new reality to our advantage. In this strange new age of universal journalism – every phone a television camera, every schmuck a media mogul – we have to learn to thrive.

Instead of being defined by the new reality, you have to define it.

You have to learn how to Yelp yourself.

What do I mean by Yelp yourself? You have to carefully assess your work from every conceivable angle and ask yourself all of the hard questions. You have to learn to see your work through every eye, hear it through every ear – you must, in effect, become the hive-mind, the crowd source, the omniscient Zeitgeist. An entrepreneur who fears feedback is an entrepreneur doomed to fail. Learn how to put up with a couple of grouches. But also learn to read feedback as invaluable data that helps you hone your gift into its sharpest focus and deepest impact.   

The Nature of Fear

Fear is good. It keeps us alive. It keeps us from falling off cliffs, touching fire and kissing rattlesnakes. But fear is also our greatest liability. It keeps us from taking the risks necessary to develop our unrealized potential. If we let it, fear has the power to keep us from becoming who we really are. Fear is a thief that steals our joy.

The daily work of every thinking man and woman is to practice careful discernment in the assessment of their fear. A life of pointless risk-taking is dangerous and foolish while a life devoted to the avoidance of all risk is doomed to frustration, stagnation and incompletion.  Fear is neither good nor evil; it is a message from our psyche that must be read with great care. Cultivating the skill to interpret fear accurately is an essential task in the creation of the well-lived and fully-realized life. When fear arises, ask yourself these seven questions.

1. If I do this frightening thing, will it bring real quality and beauty into my life?

2. If I do this frightening thing, will it move me further toward the fullest expression of my innate potentialities?

3. Am I respecting my health and life, and the health and life of others?

4. Is this fear really just a misguided attempt to protect my fragile and limiting self-image?

5. Is this apprehension and anxiety simply the death-throes of my outmoded ways of acting, thinking and being in the world?

6. If I took these risks and let go of my old ways of acting, thinking and being in the world, would I be closer to my highest good?

7. Is the larger purpose of my life the realization of my highest good as opposed to being comfortable?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, your fear is telling you something important. You should probably listen. It’s difficult to reach your highest potential if you are maimed or dead, and it’s difficult to manifest your fullest happiness if your actions harm others. But if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, then you should override your fear and take action. And by the way, if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, you are implicitly answering yes to all of them.

Helpful research from the field of psychology shows that our thinking is stuck in two important and debilitating ways. The first is negative thinking. We tend to exaggerate the scale and frequency of negative situations and minimize or overlook positive situations or circumstances. Through tens of thousands of years of evolution, human consciousness has grown highly adept at scanning the horizon, both literally and figuratively, for problems and potential disasters. The individual who most rapidly perceives the impending problem – the crouching Saber toothed tiger, the lethally poisonous snake, the toxic forest mushroom – has a far better chance of survival and passing on his genes. Natural selection rewards caution.

If negative thinking isn’t successfully challenged, the mistaken notion that fearful living equals wisdom takes hold, hindering the necessary risk required in any process of growth or advancement.

The second prevalent mode of consciousness that seems to have grown beyond the bounds of its usefulness is confirmation bias. We exaggerate evidence that supports our preconceived positions and ignore or denigrate evidence that challenges our preconceived positions. The positive aspect of confirmation bias is that in enables us to bond tightly with an in-group that shares our perspective, a dynamic that helps us form close families and tribes. The negative aspect of confirmation bias is that it locks us into a worldview in which accurate and wide-ranging critical thinking is no longer possible. Our fears become dogma – unquestionable truths closed to inquiry and investigation.  

When you put negative thinking and confirmation bias together, you have a serious problem. All manner of evils begin to take shape – racism, xenophobia, nationalism, bigotry, arrogance, and ethnocentrism. In other words, fear becomes the idol before which all must kneel. To move beyond fear means to correct the imbalance and empirical inaccuracy of negative thinking and confirmation bias. An honest assessment of the environment shows that the universe is not a hostile, dangerous field of impending disasters. Yes there are dangers, but the fact remains that we are supported and nourished continually by an uninterrupted flow of abundance. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the light and beauty and love of the world and its myriad creatures hold us aloft in an unbreakable web of being. This isn’t some hippie dream. It’s a measurable fact.

And when we begin to awaken from the illusion of individual and tribal superiority, our natural humility is restored and we begin to recognize that our ideologies and arguments are not universally authoritative – there are other, equally valid ways of understanding the complexities before us and there are other, equally viable ways of organizing society, determining justice and supporting what is best in us. In other words, we move from fearful self-obsession to loving-kindness. A broad and generous smile replaces the narrow, guarded squint through which we had been viewing the world.

And when we begin to view the world differently, the world changes. As the Talmud reminds us, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

Breaking free of the debilitating effects of fear is an inside job.

Maybe the first step is to recognize that uncertainty is a necessary precondition for all growth and emergence. How could a seed know what lay above the surface of the soil? Yet it pushes upward anyway. How could a mother know what lay ahead for her and her baby? But she gives birth anyway. How could a guitar player know if this solo is going to be great or an awkward failure? But he throws himself into it with finesse, skill and abandon anyway, trusting the truth that there is no beauty without risk. Becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an essential component of any creative process, especially the creation of a magnificent life.

It was early in the year 1933. America was in the abyss of the Great Depression and genuine hardship was tearing apart the fabric of this once great nation. In the opening lines of his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the immortal words, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Ten million Americans heard his voice crackling through their radios, and many more read his words in the next morning’s paper. His simple truth struck a chord and sparked a shift in consciousness. The radical notion that fear itself was the enemy – not external conditions no matter how dire – was a message that brought hope into a hopeless world. How powerful it is to consider the possibility that fear, an important ally when carefully and critically managed, can become the most crippling hindrance.  

The Nature of Craving

We’re trapped in a hungry animal. Gasping for air, thirsty all the time, burning fuel like a Colorado wildfire – we have, shall we say, certain needs. And no matter how much air, water and food we devour, our needs go on unabated. There is no end to the hunger.

Life itself is one giant alimentary canal. Life-forms go in one end, poop comes out the other. I didn’t make the rules. This is just the way it is.

To demonize desire, therefore, is to demonize life.

But we also recognize that our desires are not very smart. They don’t have a brain. If left unchecked, they’d kill us. Addiction, obesity, debauchery, all manner of disease-causing overconsumption – desire is a terrible steward of the life-form it inhabits.

Without desire, we’re dead. With desire, our lives are in constant peril. Philosophers have long struggled with this paradox, working hard to draw a line between healthy and unhealthy hunger.  From their work a few simple principles emerge. Since desire itself is neither good nor evil it falls on our skills of discernment to distinguish the good from the bad. Pious platitudes and blanket taboos fail where subtler insights prevail. It’s time for us to grow up and move into a more sophisticated philosophy of desire.

Perhaps a simple test, consisting of a few salient questions, could help us steer a course through the minefield of our endless hunger.

When faced with a craving, ask yourself the following seven questions:

1.      If I do this, will it bring me real joy and deep satisfaction, as opposed to merely short-term pleasure?

2.      Will it expand my ability to be of service to others?

3.      Does it resonate with my higher sensibilities?

4.      Would I consent to public disclosure of this activity, as opposed to secrecy?

5.      Would this activity leave me with a lingering sense of beauty, as opposed to regret, embarrassment or shame?

6.      Is this proposed activity rooted in love of self and others? 

7.      Is this activity rooted in honoring the inherent dignity of all living things?

If you can answer yes to one of these questions then your desire is a healthy one. Do it. And by the way – if you answer yes to one of these questions, you’ve implicitly answered yes to all of them.

If you cannot answer yes to even one of these questions then your desire is an unhealthy one. Don’t do it. It won’t further your own interest or anyone else’s.

Behind this simple strategy is the idea that each of us carries within us an internal moral compass, a deeply ingrained and universal sense of right and wrong. Religious teachings, sacred texts and well-constructed ethical philosophies are nice, but they tend to create as many problems as they solve. The Bible is a good example. It contains some of the most sublime moral teachings ever written alongside some of the worst examples of cruelty, ignorance and bigotry in the history of religion. We must read any sacred text with our hearts awake, our God-given minds engaged and our intuition open to the sublime insights inspired in us by the words of the ancients. Our philosophies and theologies serve us best when they call us to our own wisdom.

Wanting to expand the scope of one’s life through the acquisition of new skills and the mastery of a craft is not wrong. It is not wrong to want to be more, to see more, to know more, to grow more. As long as your longing for expansion aligns with the seven questions, you’re fine. Nothing’s gained by playing it small and hiding your light. If carried out with humility, self-respect, love for others and the consciousness of service, pursuing one’s own greatness brings a much needed blessing to the world. A tree does not apologize for growing. Why should we? We are all blessed by the abundance of a tree’s fragrant fruit and sheltering shade. Having no ego, the tree is never foolish enough to claim credit. It just stands there with nothing to prove, allowing its inherent magnificence to do all the talking. Successful people understand this, and see their prosperity in this same light.

Seeking wealth, fame and power over others to fill an aching wound, on the other hand, is a pathological craving that generates only suffering for oneself and others. It violates one, and therefore all of the seven questions. Without humility and the consciousness of service, our growth, acquisition and expansion take on a cancerous quality that threatens the health of the whole. Seen through the lens of competition, we view the success of others with envy and covetousness. We cannot be happy unless we have more than everyone else. No matter how skillful we become at attracting material wealth, joy eludes us because we see ourselves in conflict with everyone and everything instead of as an integral expression of the universe in harmonious concert with itself.

In this light, drug addiction, alcoholism, overeating, serial shopping, and all other forms of compulsive acquisition are not moral weakness as much as they are cognitive errors – faulty calculations of how best to maximize our long-term self-interest. The active meth addict and the clean and sober meth addict in recovery are both pursuing their self-interest. One is simply objectively better at it than the other. We all naturally lean toward the good. Some of us are just better at figuring out what that actually means.

The great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas and the pagan Plato agree – there is only one power and presence in the universe and it is the Good. Whether we of our own free will come to understand it and manifest it through our choices and actions is another matter entirely.

This is why it is so important, on both a personal and societal level, that each of us does the hard work of relentless and unflinching self-examination. It’s the only thing that works. It’s the only way to break the spell our bad habits and unconscious cravings cast over us. When we do not have clarity and vision and act instead from our mindless conditioning, great harm results, to ourselves and to those around us.

Hunger and desire are not the problem. They never were. They were convenient scapegoats upon which to heap all the blame. Our Puritanical impulses are born of this great misunderstanding. It’s not censorship and abstinence we need – it’s consciousness and awakening, grounded in compassion for ourselves and others. Say yes to that which serves our highest good and no to that which doesn’t. It’s not complicated. It’s not mysterious. We carry within us the gold standard by which all actions can be tested – our God-given minds, our awakening hearts and our memory of what worked and didn’t work in the past. We know what to do and we know how to do it. All that’s left is a decision.