
When I was growing up, some people called me a ‘Pollyanna’. The origin of this name, Pollyanna, is from a book written by Eleanor Hodgman Porter in 1913. The child heroine of the book was Pollyanna Whittier who found happiness especially in the midst of disaster. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollyanna) Given the date of the novel, the world probably needed something positive as World War 1 was about to erupt in 1914. A second novel was written in 1915 called “Pollyanna Grows Up”. I still remember watching the movie starring Hayley Mills when I was a child. I loved it.
This positivity was a source of happiness growing up. I could always find something to be happy about, even things like walking on top of a frozen snowdrift in Saskatchewan, even when I fell up to my neck in that snowdrift during recess and couldn’t get out for a long time. Did I panic, maybe a little. It was cold, but I surmised that someone would notice I wasn’t in class and come out to find me. They did eventually notice. While I waited, I loved the muffled silence of the snow. It was so quiet and peaceful, I could hear my heart beating.
Being positive, however, is not the same thing as being thankful. Was I thankful I fell into a snowdrift? Not at all. Was I thankful someone came out to rescue me? You bet! The event was not the cause for thankfulness, but when someone did something positive to rescue me, that’s when I was thankful. I think we all think about thankfulness in this way. At Thanksgiving, we think about our ancestors and the first harvest they celebrated even though it was hard work in harsh conditions. I like to think they celebrated with a special meal, a religious service and music. They were thankful they had enough food to make it through the winter thanks to the generosity and knowledge of indigenous people who taught them and helped them.
Today, at Thanksgiving, what exactly are we thankful for? Food is available at food stores and most of us can afford to buy and grow enough to survive. If one listens to the news, however, our existence is anything but thankful. We listen as politicians play the politician game of slagging each other at every opportunity. Being thankful for something that turned out well or even half-decently has not been on the radar for news reporting for a long time. Our CBC News instituted a 5 minute (maximum) segment called “the moment“ at the end of each news hour to report on something positive that happened in our country, a ‘feel good’ story after an hour of economic woes, disasters, murders, political strife, and upheaval. It’s enough to make even the most ‘Pollyanna’ among us feel depressed and certainly not thankful.
Let’s go back to my snowdrift incident and take a deeper look at the nature of thankfulness. I was on my way back to the little school building at the end of recess and had lingered longer than I should have so I was the last person outside. I imagine I got side tracked with something interesting and didn’t notice I was alone, so I hurried and didn’t pay attention to where I was going. I didn’t let myself panic. I felt it rise inside, but knew it would only make my situation worse. I’d heard plenty of stories about children freezing to death in the bitter prairie cold, often steps from warmth and safety. I attempted to get back up onto the snow, but the snow broke around me just like thin ice on a river. I learned that thrashing around in the snowbank wasn’t helpful and that I just needed to wait. I thought of yelling, but no-one could hear me in the school. The walls were thick and the windows all had their second layer of wood and glass frames to keep the cold out. I had done everything I could to fix my situation and had thought about my chances of getting rescued. All I could do was wait. The degree to which I was relieved when I was eventually rescued seemed to be similar to the degree of my predicament. Then, of course, my relief turned to thankfulness for my rescuers.
Perhaps there are a few more stages to thankfulness after relief. What about ‘learning’ and ‘implementing’ stages? We tend to gloss over both of these or we take a cursory glance at them because we don’t want a repeat of the reasons for our relief and thankfulness. We avoid snowbanks by going around them but we also give up the joy of walking on them again. What if I had learned I needed to start back to the school with everyone else, or that I needed to walk on snow drifts with a buddy? I could have implemented those solutions and kept the joy of walking on snow drifts. It’s basically how children learn. I only needed to be alone and cold in a snowdrift once. It did not happen again, like the proverbial finger on a hot stove element or a tongue on a frozen metal post. Perhaps, as adults, we take our job of keeping our children safe seriously, but don’t tend to think about the curiosity or wonder or joy their child was engaged in before the unsafe incidents.
Let’s break thankfulness down a little more. The next example is about trials and trauma and how thankfulness can be a part of those, too, leading us to something else that’s way beyond positivity. The quote below from Gabor Mate’s book “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture” describes this. Mate is quoting the thoughts of a client who had cancer:
“...I think that if there were one underlying reason why I got sick it was unreckoned–I hadn’t gone deep enough in processing my trauma…. A disease is not like a thing. It is energy flow, it’s a current; it is evolution or devolution that occurs when you’re not awake and connected, and trauma is essentially ruling your life ... .What if when you got sick, you weren’t a stage [of a disease] but in a process? And cancer, just like having your heart broken, or getting a new job, or going to school, were a teacher? What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart?” Maté Gabor, and Maté Daniel. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Kindle.ca. Toronto, Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. https://read.amazon.ca/.
Indeed, this insightful client was very ill and that illness led her to transformation. Was she thankful for the illness itself? I doubt it, but the awareness and process she went through to arrive at viewing her illness as a transformative process is remarkable. I was in the middle of an illness that hadn’t been diagnosed yet and had arrived at similar conclusions. The following is from my, as yet, unpublished book:
Why was I experiencing unexplainable symptoms? … Coping with very nearly losing my soul-mate, running my business, stressing about being the sole money earner, not processing earlier traumas deeply enough, in addition to being unconscious (at that time) of the patterns running my own life scripts, could be seen as a process of transformation! I won’t think of illness in the same way ever again!
Was I thankful for the mysterious illness affecting me? Not even a little bit! Was I thankful this illness caused me to pause and think about what it was teaching me? It's difficult to even express how thankful I was, but here's my attempt. It was a thankfulness that emerged from within and was so profound that it changed the way I thought about illness itself. It was a transformation so deep it affected my attitude toward this ‘thing’ that was coursing through my body. I was able to remain peaceful about not knowing what I had for a few months even though the probable diagnoses were serious illnesses. Perhaps this Thanksgiving, as we gather with family and friends, we can also be mindful of how a trauma or illness or unfortunate event can be the catalyst for awareness and transformation that deepens our souls and opens our hearts.
The point about giving thanks is to actually give thanks for all things and circumstances including the lessons learned and teachable moments, not just in our daily Gratitude Journals. Widen the net of thankfulness to include being able to breathe, or walk on snowbanks, or live in a particularly beautiful city. Allow joy to erupt spontaneously. Perhaps every new day dawning is cause enough to be thankful for our existence. When being thankful originates from deep within our soul, it is the nature of thankfulness to transform us and open our hearts.
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