MY OWN WALKING - Journal March/April 2022

I've been making a practice, a somewhat irregular one, of taking time to write down things I'm grateful for. Each time when I open my notebook and write down my impressions, I'm aware that in this process what is noted is not always gratitude. It maybe on the path to gratefulness, but it has a way to go before actually touching it. This has started a reflection for me about what the relationship between appreciation and gratefulness is. There obviously is one. Appreciation is an observation, containing an emotional response that sometimes results in gratefulness. But a lot of the time it remains just appreciative.

Brother David talks about the element of surprise in gratefulness. You become a aware, as if for the first time, of a feeling, impression, thought, action or a person. The effect upon you of that given moment is that it takes you by surprise, startles your five senses unexpectedly.  Suddenly you appreciate your life or experience in a different way. As though what was once monochrome is now coloured. The consequence is that you may stay with that moment, until you no longer can, and then bask in remembering your appreciation. Feeling a grateful uplift that it exists.

Appreciation contains the potential to love what is present, or recently passed from your experience. To love it wholeheartedly and unconditionally. And in what we are aware of, appreciate and love we find the foundation of gratefulness. There is always the tendency in the remembering of appreciation and love, for it to be overcome by sentiment and nostalgia. To slip into desire and not gratefulness. Gratefulness seems strongly related to any given moment. Each instance if it will be lost. Once we look back, longing for that moment to return, our grip on gratitude slips.

To feel grateful for an experience, is to appreciate and love what appears in each given moment. Simply for existing. For being just as it is. Its value is in its impermanence, that it will disappear. This is all part of why we feel grateful for something existing at all. For it is transient. Each moment of gratefulness is special. It is unique. True gratefulness appears not to cling. It immediately has to be let go of.

All this runs counter to some of my habitual feelings and responses. On some days I'll place a qualification, a but, a negative coda following after any expression of gratefulness. As if this is required for authentic truthfulness. The nature of any practice is that it feels inauthentic at first. For it will be. Gratefulness is being faked. You will feel a fraud, and that is OK. I'm playing let's pretend, until at some point may be I am not. 

The practice is to tune into a different way of appreciating experience. To change the habits of a lifetime rarely happens overnight. Becoming more appreciative is a huge step in the direction of gratefulness. Even thought it may not yet be grateful appreciation. Like a novice archer, its all about the practise and perfection of your aim.

I'm becoming more aware that gratefulness, when you do feel it, needs to find its own particular form of expression. There is an imperative, an impulse within gratefulness that demands it should be spoken, expressed through action. What is the medium or voice for this?  It may not be truly gratefulness unless you do. Gratefulness at heart is about an expressed connection, of a love for a love.