Gratitude: Every day above ground, you're on top of the world

Gratitude: Every day above ground, you're on top of the world

Samuel Bird

My father screamed so hard, his veins bulged on his forehead and saliva sprayed my face. He put his hands over his face and began to rack himself back and forth. “No one understands me. No one cares.” He screamed loud enough for his voice to crack. He kicked the chair I was standing next to me and shrieked. “You, this is all your fault.” He said to me, “I’m going to put a gun in my mouth and then you’ll see what you have. Then you will know how good of a father I am and all I provide for you.” He looked at my tiny little face, but before he could act on the violence bursting in his eyes, he stepped back toward the door and slammed it enough to enlarge the crack that let in the cold from many times being slammed before. My six year-old body strained not to cry, showing weakness that could be used against me as my mother came closer to me. I was worried she would pile on with him, or she would pit herself against me as a third party. She got down on her knees and looked me in the eyes trying to cage in their tears. No harshness was in her somber voice as she looked at my face. “You know what his mistake is Sam?” I thought about it and said, “that he is mean?” She shook her head. “His biggest mistake is that he is not grateful. It sounded like the most foolish thing to me. He had just made a case for why his life was terrible, and he had some strong evidence. “If you don’t want to turn out like this,” she said gesturing toward a war-torn room, “Then you need to be grateful.” She knew that I wanted to find love one day and had used it to get what she wanted from me, but this was different. There was nothing she could gain from her advice. What then was her motivation? I later found my mother had moments of breaching self-awareness and this was one of those tender times. 

I love my father more than words can say. I think he deserved a lot better than the life he had. He would come home every night to sleep for four hours before returning to work, but couldn’t sleep because he was coughing up blood from the dangerous chemicals used at the plastic factory he worked excruciating hours at. When he had free moments between, he would play with us children, try to keep our small home safe from the elements, and spend time with us in the garden. When he had his violent outbursts, they were so sudden and alien to him the rest of the time, that you would be surprised to see they came from the same person. My problem is that even during the good times, he could never get too close to the child he hated the most. I wish to God I had a way to travel through time and give that young father with so little trying so much, a hug. You may say that is now what he deserves, but I have some funny views about justice. Though I am not naive enough to say all people are inherently good, I think it is just as silly to say they are evil. He, like many, had core desires of great merit, but they were overshadowed by lower sufferings. It is always a tender balance between excusing someone’s violation against you and forgiving them, but it is an awfully beautiful struggle to have. Though my heart has room for this man and all his failings, it could only do so by not being the same as he was. This was my greatest fear. I would do whatever it took to be different from him and in doing so found my own new and exciting mistakes. My bumping into the world around me caused its own pains and problems for others, but it was never as deep as severe as his. And why was this? Because I am grateful. 

You may think it makes sense to say I am grateful now, but I was grateful then, in the thick of it. The oatmeal with bugs I had to eat nearly every meal when I was eight years-old, was a tasty treat when you got used to it. A filthy and cold house that kept most of the elements out was still something. Someone pretending to love me to get what they wanted was still a practice in love. The deeply ironic part of my father’s life, is like many evil people, he blamed everything on his immense pain. However, in doing so, he caused much more pain for others. Think of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and yet the much worse pain he brought into the world. I was different however, because though my situation had less good and more bad, it still had some good, and I got to choose how powerfully I saw it. Someone can be a peasant in a third world country and as gleeful as can be or perhaps a billionaire who can’t wait for life to leave him alone and for good. I do not think happiness in life is the best aim, but striving and sense of fulfillment are, and they can be surprisingly relativistic on what they need. So, if we get to choose how much we are happy with, can’t we choose something more approximating what we have? One idea I think I am finally willing to start committing to, is the bidirectional relationship between isness and oughtness. By this, I mean that as what we have comes from what we want, what we want can come from what we have. For example, I find one of the facets of what makes a good life is what is in line from what is biological. We can learn what to value and desire from what we have before us. If so, gratitude can look at what we have to give us a clue of what we can be content with. Perhaps, we could even leave the marker closer to where we are. 

It doesn’t matter how wonderful I say something is, if I don’t make it clear what it is. Gratitude is value desired from the inner world being recognized and deeply known from the outer world. It is then the realization of value that already exists. As the universe is random enough, it would be effectively impossible for someone to be dealt a hand with no value, and if they were, then they wouldn’t be alive to see it. Therefore, if you are alive, there is some good to recognize. If you wake up every morning to a depraved horror, the fact that you wake up counts for something. I had a little saying I liked to say when I was younger: “Every day above ground, I’m on top of the world.” There may of course be larger subsidiary things for us to be grateful for, but we at least have the core things. It is normal to start with the material. Thinking of a home, tool, or toy you appreciate having. Then experiences. I love this trip, my college experience, or that sunset. Then relationships. I love this friend, I appreciate this foe, I need my family. Finally, gratitude can come from the most properly basic facts of existence. I am grateful I am, I am grateful for everything good or bad, and I am grateful for what is to come. The depth of this scale is the depth of satisfaction that comes from life. When everything is something to be seen with value, there is much value to be had. 

This helps with a discovery of value, but gratitude also works as the creator of it. The human mind is so powerful and complex, it is difficult to say what it does so well, let alone how well it does it. One of the most impressive examples is our ability to find what we are looking for or are expecting. Sometimes I’ll go to read something and have such a strong expectation of what will be there, I read words that aren’t on the page. Not only can we use gratitude to find what value exists in the world around us, but now we can start to change what we see as valuable. This way of beginning to think with gratitude will turn passing moments that seem without import, to border on nirvana. The mind will be set to work looking for things of beauty, and since that beauty exists in that mind, beauty will come in abundance. 

Life is always giving and taking from us. People, things, and chances come and go in a barrage that takes a lot of fortitude to know how to cope with. A delicious meal is cooked, but soon the plate is empty. A shirt gifted, but eventually a tear deems it useless. A friend comes into our lives, but the time comes that friend must leave. This is inevitable and powerful. Any soul caught trying to stop this tide will only drown themselves. With no engagement with existence or Esse Maxim, studies in my time have found that the pain of loss is nearly three times more powerful as the joy of reception or experiencing. This is a large issue with things coming and going in our lives as they bring some joy when they come, but much more pain when they leave. Much of human soothing and therapy is the easing of pain on the back end, but I think there is another method to ensure we don’t wear ourselves out from this tide of gain and loss. Gratitude is the maximizing of the value in receiving and experiencing something. That wonderful object will break, the person will die, and the moment will end. However, you can control exactly how much you soak up that beauty and goodness while you have it. You will still have loss, but there is consolation in the old gain, the possession, and possible new gains to come. While this is not how he intended it to be used, Martin Heidegger’s idea of something being “present at hand” applies to loss. The human mind seems to recognize change over static facts, and as such, we often see the merit of something when it is no longer in our lives. Gratitude is in part, an effort to see the merit all along, before the thing at hand is gone. Sometimes the car breaks down so we can be grateful that there was a car. Sometimes the heart breaks so we can be grateful we could ever feel. To have inconvenience, shakes us from our pragmatic lives and teaches us about what it really means that things ever existed.

I once was driving across Alabama in the type of torrential downpour of rain that makes rivers where roads were, when I saw a large trash can moving. We were in the middle of nowhere somewhere between Selma and Montgomery and I was surprised to see a person pop out of the trash can. I pulled the car over as I pulled my jacket over my head as I ran to the man. He was only wearing cargo shorts, a white sock and a gray sock, and a big smile on his face. He seemed to be around sixty years old, and it looked like a mean sixty years. “Excuse me sir, are you okay?” He smiled a grin littered with a few crooked yellow teeth. “Blessed by the Lord.” He said with no effort to fight off the rain. He reached his hands into the trash and pulled out bags and cans. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Making a little home for myself.” When he pulled the last of the trash out, he promptly climbed inside and gave me a victorious smile as I felt bad I was still fighting to stray when he was soaked. “Let me grab something for you.” I ran to my homeless box and grabbed food, water, and some toiletries. I looked around for clothes, but only had my fancy wool dress sweater. I laughed to myself at how it wouldn’t match his outfit as I ran to him. He was sitting in his trashcan like a hermit crab with that same authentic grin. “Here, I said as I handed him the now wet bundle of goods. He grabbed it as he looked up at me. “Ah, an angel. You know the Lord sent you right?” I nodded, though I didn’t feel that angelic. “The Lord has been good to me.” He said, piquing my curiosity. “Sir, if I may ask, do you feel perhaps you have a bad fortune?” He smiled and laughed as he looked at me from his garbage receptacle home. “Oh maybe when you look at this man or that lady, I don’t look too fancy. But when people start wanting, they want this, and that, and then another until the only thing they have more of than stuff in their home is want in their heart.” I nodded as I realized some of the current pain I felt was from wanting. “No, I think if I get to choose when to be happy, now is fine.” He smiled bigger than before as I leaned in and gave me a hug and told him thank you for teaching me something worth more than some granola bars and jerky. This man was content with what was, and as such, didn’t have to rack his mind for what could have been. 

I recently became the first person in my family to graduate with a bachelor's degree. I reached out to my father after a many year hiatus. I knew he wouldn’t come, but I wanted him to know he was thought of. I stood there, cap and gown, trying to fathom the rest of my life, when I saw a face I hadn’t seen in my waking hours in half a decade. I ran and gave him a hug before he could say anything or I could. I told him how grateful I was to have him there. I told him I was grateful for what he had done for me. I told him a rehearsed list I had of what I was most grateful to him for: The work ethic he taught me, the charm he passed on to me, the love of nature he raised me in, the pattern of stories he told me, and the simple fact he helped me exist, which I love deeply. We sat talking for a few hours and he listened when I told him about Esse Maxim. Something about telling him about my life’s work was near sacred to me. I think part of all my bragging was to say: You didn’t ruin me dad, it’s okay. We will never be like other fathers and sons, and my nightmares will never allow me to bring him too deeply into my life, but it was near divine to have him there for that special moment. I know in the current zeitgeist that I am not allowed to say that my suffering was meaningful enough to be worth it, but dammit it was. I spend more time being angry, miserable, and lonely than most any people I have ever met. However, I also spend more time crying with gratitude for the sheer fact of my existence than anyone I could ever meet. The core of my being and the fruition of all I am is something that I am so grateful for. For this reason, out of all the ideas other than Esse Maxim, the one that I would share with you to make your existence the most it could be, is gratitude. Gratitude saved my life, so if you are in need of saving, I think I have a recommendation. I know when my time comes and I am laying on a bed laboriously pulling in my few last breaths, there will be one thought that slices through any possible regret, lost opportunity, or fear for what I leave behind. I will say with eyes as teary as they are when I write this: “Wow, I am so grateful I got to exist.”