I had back surgery three weeks ago. While waiting in the prep room I was visited by medical personnel, each explaining his or her role in the process. The surgeon, his Physician’s Assistant, two anesthesiologists, another doctor and his assistant, each played a role. The second doctor explained that he will place electrodes all over my body to monitor the surgeon’s proximity to nerves. Since this was a delicate surgery (working around a calcified disc), any unwanted contact with nerves could be disastrous. There might have been eight to ten medical people in the operating room.
“Don’t worry,” said the electrode doc, “we’ll take real good care of you.”
When they put the mask over my face, my last thought was a combination of wonderment and gratitude. This small army of people in white coats, with their education, expertise, and experience, were there to take care of one single individual. Was there ever a time or place in the history of mankind, where everyday people could have a roomful of medical professionals dedicate to…
I awakened about one second later (four hours in real time) in the recovery room, at which time I added anesthesia to my growing gratitude list. Under anesthesia, we do not dream; time disappears. It is the closet state of mind and body to death. We simply cease to exist. Happily, we also wake up.
During the two days in the hospital, I was visited by another army of nurses, orderlies, a physical therapist, an occupational therapist, and the surgeon’s PA. Orderlies took me to the bathroom; they warned me to pull the cord when I finished. They were quite emphatic. “Do not attempt to walk back alone!” Twenty-four hours a day, when I pressed the help button, someone was there in a flash. Nurses checked my vital signs. They brought narcotics when I needed pain medication. When hungry, I placed an order to the kitchen for Surf and Turf, but had to settle for meat loaf. (To be honest with you, the food had a lot to be desired. I mean a lot!) Being a life-long newshound, I clicked on the news to watch the strangest, most dramatic and unusual election in American history. (Let’s leave politics out of this. It’s enough to bring back my pain.)
One hundred years ago I would have been crippled and in perpetual misery. All those medical personnel were a blessing. Living at this time and place is a blessing. Anesthesia is a blessing. Literacy is a blessing. Freedom is a blessing. Education is a blessing. Books are a blessing. Music is a blessing. Air travel is a blessing. Cell phones are a blessing. PCs are a blessing. Order and security are blessings. A cornucopia of entertainment is a blessing, (and also a curse; a topic for another time).
You and I were born into this fully formed world. It was a gift from the ages. It’s almost as if the world today sprung into existence fully developed like a societal Big Bang. We didn’t have to work for our good fortune. No struggles, no sacrifice, no uncertainty, no overbearing government limiting our choices. Naturally, in our individual lives, we have our share of insecurities, failures, regrets, disappointments and mistakes. Making our way through life’s arena is not easy. But we weren’t hunting and gathering for food, frozen all the time during glaciation periods in the ice ages. We don’t die of old age at thirty. We don’t live in terror of the Norsemen invading our village, taking our property, and raping our women.
The takeaway is the oldest of cliches, but continues to be priceless:
Count Your Blessings.
Some of us do; some of us need to be reminded of it.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GRATITUDE COIN
A good argument can be made that suffering and struggle open our eyes to gratitude. When everything is going well, we shrug off our good fortune.
Apparently, this concept has been on my mind for a very long time.
Journal entry, Sunday, April 2, 1972
I’m at the Munich airport on my way to Malta.
Sometimes I can understand hatred for the affluent middle class, especially for the kids. A group of American adolescents here at the airport are checking in to return to the States after a ski vacation. They are loud, obnoxious, and seem to so blithely accept their good fortune...I find it annoying. They take for granted their great privilege at having money and education. They yawn. They are sixteen and skiing in Europe – and they yawn. They make noise. They dress in the most stylish of clothing. Many dress in the traditional uniform of bell bottom genes… If I were a European, I would look upon them with distaste…There must be hundreds of them milling around.
I believe so strongly that young people must suffer and worry to truly appreciate the good things of life. To have never suffered, to have never worked or worried, will produce an empty person.
That song from The Fantasticks says it so elegantly:
“Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.”
Fortunately, I have suffered and worried and wondered and have become somewhat reflective. The person who has never pondered life’s meaning and life’s vicissitudes, is empty.
I’m glad I’ve been able to travel the world and travel on my own. I came as an individual – not as a smug kid.
Smug? No, I could never have been smug. Nine years ago, I was coming apart from inscrutable “Anna Collins” and the strain of college. At the time it didn’t seem possible that I’d be where I am today.
I was twenty-eight when I wrote the above. If I could talk to my younger self, I would tell him to BACK OFF. Take. It. Easy. Be less judgmental. You can’t expect American adolescents, raised in a secure and orderly world, to have an attitude of gratitude. They are on vacation having a good time. Their lack of experience, general ignorance, lack of perspective and limited struggles, renders them unlikely to appreciate their good fortune. They understand on some nebulous level, that people in other times and places had/have it far worse than they. But it remains something of an abstraction. Many have little sense that their comfortable world is something of an anomaly.
Although my younger self was overly disdainful of ingratitude, he understood that the struggles he endured helped make him grateful for the good life he was living. Had he given up, had he not walked through the pain, he wouldn’t have been at the Munich airport appreciating what he had had. And perhaps, if he had not struggled to the point of suffering, he might have fallen into an abyss.
The takeaway is simple and profound: struggle and suffering can have positive consequences. They can discourage you, weaken you, destroy you, and depress you; but they can also make you stronger.
In an interview on October 15, 2020, British writer, Douglas Murray, suggested that
people living in the late twentieth century and early twenty first,
need to be shown the unbelievable good luck of being born in a country
like America, at this point in history. People today think the good lives
they live are part of the natural order of things…they have no idea
because they’ve never been anywhere else, they’ve never studied
any history, they are wildly ignorant, they’ve no idea what America is…is
unimaginably rare in human history.
In a presentation to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July, 2018, radio talk show host, Dennis Prager, said the following.
It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have
not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but
have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed
they should be.
It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one’s country
leaves a terrible hole in one’s soul and because ungrateful people
always become unhappy and angry people.
These unhappy, angry and ungrateful people are this country’s greatest critics, and they have been hacking away at the United States for the last seventy-five years. According to America’s detractors, why should anyone be grateful to a country that is racist, imperialist, sexist, oppressive, war-like, polluting, and based on the theft of competitive capitalism? As a result, they want to fundamentally change America, as President Obama said prior to his election. They want to burn the whole thing down – the economic system, family, marriage, values, common heritage, the military, the police, religion, education at every level, sexual mores, patriotism and the work ethic.
A recent Gallup poll earlier this year, found that one quarter of Generation Z were unhappy. Also, this year, a global Gallup poll saw the United States fall from the fifteenth happiest country to the twenty-third. Increasing numbers of us lack struggle, suffering, gratitude, purpose, meaning, happiness and perspective. Young people who were needed in the past to help plant the crops, today stare vacuously at screens.
“Never in history, wrote Victor Davis Hanson, in December, 2021, ‘has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much, and yet expressed so little gratitude, to its now dead forebears.”
The current CRISIS has been caused in part, by the death of gratitude.
Count your blessinsgs is a golden cliche’ that contiues to echo down through the ages.
Gracie, I had to laugh when I read "you tackled a lot." It all seemed to intertwine. Yes, gratitude is the core thesis. I fully realize that I was born into favorable circumstances, not the least of which was also the opportunity to be free to act to build on that foundation. I suppose I always had a subliminal sense of gratitude that surfaced once in a while, like at the Munich Airport, but the older I get the more grateful I am for everything.
You've tackled a lot here, Fred. But, as I read it, gratitude is the core thesis. I could not agree more that we live in a remarkable time and place. Those of us in America who have white privilege and relative wealth, access to education, health care, and various luxuries captured by our discretionary income MUST be aware of our bounty. We need to share that bounty and we need to keep gratitude in our minds at all time. TBH, that applies , I think, to all human beings. We have life. We can be grateful for that. But some of us have so much for which to be grateful. Like you, I was aware of my blessings even in my youth. I grew up being reminded daily to be grateful for the dinner in front of me and for the family around me. I was reminded that I was healthy and had a library card. I was rainsed ina. large working class family so not a lot of extras and money had to be stretched (especially since my parents wanted us to attend Catholic schools (cha ching). There are days now when I am struggling more with physical and mental health issues but I can almost always find my way to a more reasonable place by saying thank you. I say thank you to the people around me and I say thank you to the Universe/God/Divine Presence - whatever you choose to call that almighty power (love?). I hope I havef taught my own children to do the same. They are the kids who really got it all b/c they grew up with all the privilege I had PLUS two parents who had professional employment that brought in enough money that there was room for some vacay or an occasional meal out . I watch my kids now as they raise tiny human beings of their own. May the thread of gratitude always run though their lives. Thank you for this thoughtful piece.