I've been thinking about gratitude.

I am so grateful that Stephen has been my doctor for thirty-five years. His specialties are Internal Medicine and Geriatrics, the first of which I’ve needed him for since I met him, the latter of which I now need him for more than I wish were true. He is the commander-in-chief of my medical care. He schedules my exams, prescribes a growing number of meds, and recommends referrals whenever something outside his specialties shows up in my test numbers: cardiology, prostate, melanomas. He saved my life a dozen years ago when he insisted that I have a prostate serum test every three months instead of each year; within the first year he caught my rising numbers before they reached potentially lethal levels and referred me to a urologist who sent me City of Hope Cancer Hospital for surgery.

We’re in one of those unequal friendships where he takes constant care of me and all I can give back to him are my unending thanks. Every visit with him includes significant time to catch up on our personal lives, and such is the intimacy of our friendship that it was he who taught me a lesson about gratitude that I live with as best I can.

He and I had our first grandchildren at about the same time, years ago. We were both deeply moved by the arrival of this new generation in each of our families, and over the next few years reported details of their growth each time we saw one another. In one of those conversations, he said something that I’ve pasted to my brain as unforgettable wisdom; it helps me realign my temperament when I get stuck in the muck or lost in the darkness. We were talking about our mutual delight at the arrival of these new ones, and he said, it’s hard to be cynical when you’re so full of gratitude.

Thanksgiving arrives this year in a season in which it’s easy to be cynical. We live with the ongoing nightmare of war in the Middle East, with its ugly overtones of antisemitism and racist disregard for the lives of Palestinians, all laid beside the two-year slog through the bombardment of civilians and the abandonment of bodies on the border between Ukraine and Russia. At the same time, now that we’re officially one year out from our next national election, the volume increases in both our political garbage fights and in candidates' and supporters' lying and dissembling.

Closer to home, two dear friends in their seventies are very ill. As a therapist I wade through my weekly appointments with people I care about whose marriages are boring or filled with anger and distrust, whose depression and anxiety are further fueled by the cultural madness, and whose children are drinking their way through their first semester of college or drifting into a dark, disturbing mood about what lies ahead for them in a culture on the edge of disasters.

So for several nights, I laid awake trying to find my beloved doctor’s voice in the skeptical din: it’s hard to be cynical when you’re so full of gratitude. It took a surprising effort to hold off cynicism’s disruptive assaults on my contemplations and to put together an honest list of what I’m grateful for, a bulwark against the troubles of the season already gathering in front of me.

When I have the thought or hear the advice that I should be grateful for something, what rises in me is not gratitude, but obligation.

You should be thankful for your health; for your family’s mental, emotional, and financial prosperity; for the fact that you live in a democracy and not a dictatorship; for God’s presence in your life…

and on and on. But obligation elicits in me not gratitude but resentment. Life’s burdens are already great, and I do not need the weight of these obligations of gratitude on my already-burdened soul.

Telling me about what I should think, what I should feel, what I should be grateful for or believe in always drives me back forty-five years to a story from my friend, Betty. She had a neighbor who had one of those sayings burned into a piece of wood, varnished, and hung over her kitchen sink as a daily reminder. The sign said, in capital letters, I WILL NOT SHOULD ON MYSELF TODAY. When gratitude is presented as an obligation, I feel my resentment rising, glance at my memory’s imprint of that sign, refuse to should on myself, and confirm that whatever obligation is laid on me, what it elicits is not gratitude.

I’m grateful for things that make me happy. In that way, gratitude is different from empathy. Empathy is about my feelings for you, my desire to move close to whatever you are experiencing and lend the weight of my love to your joy or sadness, pleasure or pain. Empathy is my eager effort to align myself with whatever you’re going through, and to be with you during this experience. I experience gratitude when something happens TO ME, when someone or something affirms me or enriches my life. My biggest delight is in finding this gratitude in ordinary experiences, in day-to-day moments that I’ve come to realize are food for my grateful heart.

Our eleven-year-old granddaughter, Iris, is playing soccer again this fall. Becky and I showed up on a recent Saturday afternoon for her game, just as we’ve shown up for what seems like hundreds of soccer games with our own kids, with our two grandsons, and now with Iris. Her mom and dad were there, and so was her mother’s mother and an aunt and uncle who were visiting from the Philippines. Both of our grandsons, her cousins, were there with our daughter and son-in-law. I was delighted that her team won again, but what filled me with gratitude, what made me deeply happy, was the realization that we are part of a family that shows up for each other, that says to Iris and, in different circumstances, to each of us, You matter to us. We’re here for you. Such a moment is like Life laying her hands on my head and whispering, Bless you, Rick.

I’m also grateful for ordinary moments of wonder that come from books and poetry. When our younger son was in high school in the nineties, I bought a copy of The Norton Introduction to Poetry that he was reading for his English Lit class, got a list of the assigned readings, and spent the semester coming across pieces that lit me up. I remember many of those new discoveries, but the one that has become sacred scripture to me is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, written in 1833.

I like it so much that you may have heard me talk about it before: it's an account of the aging king’s decision to leave home again, as he had left home decades earlier to spend ten years fighting the Trojan war and another ten sailing back home. As I deal with my own aging, dear Ulysses is my muse. I have the Norton Introduction on a shelf behind my chair in our den and, decades after first reading it, I take it down and read it frequently. Here’s the illuminating end of the poem for which I am repetitively so grateful. The old king says:

You and I are old; 
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; 
Death closes all: but something ere the end, 
Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: 
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep 
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 
'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 
We are not now that strength which in old days 
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; 
One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

So much that's written about aging is about diminishment: the liveliness that each decade steals from us. I am grateful to Tennyson for making the aging process inspirational - for lending to it the sense of a glorious and as yet unfinished adventure.

I am grateful, too, for music. This story from my childhood may be a fable or a fact, but whichever, I carry it as an origin story. Still in diapers, my mother would stand me in front of the huge radio/record player in our living room, turn on Ella Fitzgerald or Bing Crosby, and watch me rock from side to side, enchanted. Early in my teens I went to my first concert: Nat “King” Cole at the Hollywood Bowl. The first half was his familiar songs: Mona Lisa, Unforgettable, They Try to Tell Us We’re Too Young. The second half was Gospel music, his voice with the backing of a Black church choir. I loved many of these songs from my Sunday School experience and because Gospel was one of the sources of the pre-rock ‘n roll rhythm and blues songs I sang along with Fats Domino, The Crows, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. Gospel is still my favorite musical genre.

Rock ‘n roll tutored me through my teens and twenties, and I still have at least one station on my car radio set to Classic Rock. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Norwegian Wood, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, and Don’t You Want Somebody to Love, which nearly made me drive off the road the first time I heard Gracie Slick’s voice.

What all this music had in common is that I could sing it, alone in the car or at late-night gatherings of not-fully-sober friends or, later, in our house which always caused my kids to say, Dad, please, not again. Even as I type this piece, I have Pandora’s streaming service set to its Eva Cassidy station so I can at least hum along with her and Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon and Dylan and sing aloud with Linda Ronstadt, Feels Like Home to Me.

In the same way that I'm grateful to Tennyson for illuminating something viscerally true and resonant to me about the experience of getting older, so too am I grateful to music and gloriously talented musicians for translating my emotional and spiritual life into song. It feels to me as if the physical act of singing songs like these, so resonant of people and places and experiences I've cherished, captures some deep emotional truth about what it means to be a person, a truth that can never quite be expressed in any other way.

I've learned a fair amount about what gratitude isn't: it isn't obligation and it isn't empathy and it isn't even the pleasure of having nice things happen to you. It's the feeling that swells up, unbidden, when something profoundly revelatory emerges from a moment. It's the sense that the universe is blessing me by letting me feel the full wonder and intensity of belonging to something greater and more profoundly true than just myself, whether that's through family and community, through language, or through song.

My one fear is that the delight I take in these familiar experiences of gratitude will keep me from exploring new dimensions of what might light me up and make me grateful. Like Ulysses, I want to Push off, have the courage to sail beyond the sunset of my current favorites. Courage: that’s what it took to create what are now ordinary moments with family and friends, to search out books and music which now illuminate my soul. Perhaps I should listen again to another poet I came across decades ago, the Sufi mystic Rumi, who challenges me with this:

Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I'll be mad.