An Experience of Gratitude

People can change your life in mere heartbeats. I walked through an airport, self-absorbed in getting to a gate, when a man whose face I can’t remember flashed the most brilliant smile at me - filled with good-humor and generosity, and SO infectious that I couldn’t not smile after he’d passed for the rest of the day. You could measure that moment in heartbeats, and it was the lesson of how transformative a genuine, shared moment can be between total strangers. I have Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald going through my head - “the way you changed my life…no, no they can’t take that away from me.”

 

I feel steeped in gratitude this day, for the people who are countless beyond measure who have changed my life. What awes me is also the way it stretches back through time and swirls forward. When my friend Shannon was working with Genpo Roshi, she wrote a great thanks - to all the countless lives that have suffered to learn wisdom and pass it through the generations that brought him to where he is. He stretches in a direct lineage (whether you believe mythically or literally, it doesn’t even matter) back to the Buddha himself. It’s relevant and irrelevant too, because we have our own vast, swirling formations that bring us our wisdom around us - the generations and generations before our parents so our feet could walk this earth, the generations preceding our teachers, the masses of humanity who have created the cultures that we have arisen and been raised out of the midst of, the poets and authors and unsung muses who have influenced what we’ve read and how we think…this list is literally endless. I’ve been taught incredible lessons by trees and snow and lakes, so even the glaciers that formed the valleys of the lakes have had some role. My professor Jean expressed at her memorial service in her program an idea from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Eat, Pray, Love” - at some point you just give up trying to thank everyone and instead open into a space of your life being a constant thanks to the universe and everyone, a constant, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”  (I haven’t yet given up on trying to thank everyone, hence this email as a thanks to you.)

 

It’s a hell of a lot to contain. I’m in tears just writing this, and am mildly glad my seatmates on the plane are asleep because these words feel like they’re pouring out and the tears with them,. Every time I open even a little to my inner sense of the external world, this arises - this overflowing sense of everything, this crazy wonderful bittersweetness because each of those moments that so touched me has ended and never ends, and there are an infinite more in front of me as I walk through this life, and again and again the question arises of if I can bear it all, and always the answer at the edge of what’s unknown is only “yes”. In some sense, opening is merely a consent to being wracked by this and a consent to the great joy of it too, and the deliciousness of being alive.

 

And sometimes these vast influences, these innumerable teachers, coalesce temporarily in time and place and person, into the form of a single human being who crosses paths with you and changes your life. And they take the form of bosses, mentors, coaches, childhood friends, clients, random strangers on a plane or a train… or a boat. I have a smoothly polished river stone in my camera bag given to me by a boatman on the Yangtze River - wiry, lean, aged and weathered by years and the sun, with old eyes, he poled my little boat down one of the side stretches of the Yangtze through lush jungle between steep cliffs and let me sit in the prow of the boat. He didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak his obscure dialect of Chinese. (Plus, the Mandarin I remember consists primarily of the phrases, “I am an American”, “You are Chinese”, “I am marryable”. These are hardly helpful. The first two phrases would reinforce my brilliant mastery of the obvious, and the latter would likely send entirely the wrong idea. My name in Chinese apparently translates to being a good marriage candidate according to my college Chinese professor. Hah! Umm…yeah…moving on…) He dug around in a worn pocket pressed the stone into my hand after I smiled at him, sharing my carrying of this sense of gratitude and the melancholy that the Yangtze River itself raised in me. I knew in my bones he meant the stone as a gift. We’re all like that polished stone, tumbled and weathered. Our edges get shaped in the rubbings up against the others in our lives, and we just tumble through this existence till we get more shaped, have a few more scratches and marks, but we also learn to shine, that the facets of who we are might come out if we let them.

 

I’m in awe that everyone has that ability to change the world of those around them in the space of moments. Y’all are proof of that – in the conversations we’ve had and times when our paths have crossed. When I consulted for a luxury cruise line, they used to say that life wasn’t measured by the breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away. I’m bemused to note that my perspective on this saying has shifted in the meditative work of deepening the breaths I take. I think the place I’ve come to in this is that it’s not about the breath being taken, it’s about being so full that the only thing you CAN do is breathe - breathe it all in and then let it all out again, because in this space, there is no past, there is no future, there is only a great surrendering to the awareness of that which is greater than ourselves that we have the ability to embody for each other. And I have to giggle because there’s a voice in me that just feels all this with mild consternation because living with all this isn’t exactly comfortable and sometimes paradoxically alienating, and just says, “Well…shit.” (complete with a cowboy twang).

 

Thank you.