Celebrate Thanksgiving with Radical Gratitude

Gratitude can feel like an annoying platitude when you are missing the people you love and the life you used to love.

We’ve all lost dear friends and family members this past year and made many sacrifices to cope with COVID-19.

We’re tired of sheltering in place, masking up and missing friends and loved ones, weddings and funerals, graduations and celebrations.

This year, not all of us feel all that grateful. 

But here’s the thing: You don’t have to feel grateful to be grateful. 

Gratitude isn’t just a feeling. It’s a stance you take. A militant, radical stance you take toward life.  

Gratitude is an act of faith, sometimes the greatest faith. You believe without any proof. You love life without any conditions.

Unconditional love.

Isn’t that what we say we want from others? 

What if we gave that to life? 

Radical gratitude is to love life unconditionally. No matter what happens, to open your heart even wider, to feel all the pain and sadness and hurt, to let every struggle and strife hollow you out and clear the channel that is you so more love and joy and blessings flow through, all in that same sacred, sore space. 

It’s easy to be grateful when the proof of joy is staring you in the face, when you look around your Thanksgiving table and see everyone you love and hear their laughter and stories and share your abundance. 

It’s harder when people are missing or you can’t afford a turkey or your health took a nose dive. 

In September, my nephew died. I dearly loved Michael and still can’t believe I will never see him again. He was just 34 and his love knew no limits.  

The grief over losing him shifts when I focus not on all the years he didn’t get to live, but on the 34 years we did get with him. 

Some days the sadness trips me and grips me and won’t let go. On those days, I let myself cry and feel it deeply, all the way through. Grief is love with nowhere to go. There’s no end to it, but there’s a bend to it.  

The River of Life has endless twists and turns. It isn’t always calm. It’s white water and raging rapids and swirling eddies and gentle waterfalls and boring pools of mucky water and all of it belongs. All of it.

All we’re asked to do is surrender to the River and let it carry us downstream to our perfect good, whatever that is, wherever that is.

We don’t have to enjoy the ride. 

But then again, why not?