I’ve been practicing gratitude for a long time. I mean a reallllllly long time. As in before cell phones. I had 2:30 pm on my running watch and that’s how I was reminded to stop and take a moment.
And it’s a practice. A lot of the time, I don’t get it “right.” Meaning I don’t feel very grateful. And that’s especially true since Drumpf was elected.
I wonder why I had to live at this time. I wonder how I can be grateful when everyday I’m greeted with an endless stream of horrible things he has done, enabled, broken, or people hurt, many times irrevocably. Patton Oswalt summed it up best with his remark that every morning he wakes up, afraid to look at his phone, imagining what new atrocity Drumpf has committed will greet him. I’m sure when Oswalt wrote that a year and a half ago, he never imagined the full extent of the mayhem to come.
So it’s hard to be grateful… every day…and yet, when we look at our own personal lives- there’s much to be thankful for. The first of the Mincha Moment videos I wrote on a run in July 2011, included the following: “Be thankful that you work with at least SOME people you like” and every day I am grateful for that. I have friends like Howie, who I know always has my back; Alex, who I share every political, social, humorous, sad, piece of news/video with and who therefore always lifts my day; Loic, who makes sure I’m never technologically, mentally or emotionally abandoned; Sara, the proverbial tough guy with a heart of gold; Ellen, who I’ve mentored, and has blossomed into a force of her own—and one of the only people I know who actually takes the time out to thank me. Just some of the good ones in a sea of mental and moral decrepitude.
I don’t love my job at the University because, like most institutions, it is filled with incompetence, stupidity and laziness—but I am grateful for it. It has afforded me the ability to produce documentaries on social justice issues that David and I care about, and meet some of the most amazing people along the way. People from such completely different back grounds than mine like Sister Judith An Duvall; people who have had such different experiences than me, like Barbara Friedman; people who have moved me to tears, like Juanita Molina.
So when I get weary, and feel like the layer of black ash weighing down on me since November 2016 is literally too much to bear—I stop and think of all the people I know, places I have been, opportunities I have, and all the chocolate that’s still to be eaten. And I take a breath, and I am grateful.
