The Cold and Broken Hallelujah: Being Thankful for It All

In the past, when writing on Thanksgiving, I've listed things that happened over the past year that I'm thankful for, looking back on fond memories and trying to point my perspective in a more positive direction. But honestly, this has been a tough year--for me, for many of my friends and family, and for much of the world. In fact, calling this year "tough" sounds like an insulting understatement. We need a word with more weight to describe the personal, national, and global tragedies in the 2015 calendar. We've seen explosions of gun violence, races and religions declaring war on each other, and the sudden deaths of loved ones. On a smaller scale, this year has seen financial trouble, lost relationships, and general dissatisfaction with life. I do have reasons for gratitude, like new friends, publications, and my own place to live, but when I try to acknowledge them, they tend to fall under the shadow of this year's more bitter experiences. As the new year approaches, I imagine a lot of us feel like wet dogs staggering through the door of a new house, panting and hoping for a warm fire after surviving the storm of 2015.  

Though it may be harder to find specific things to be thankful for this year, the past eleven months have taught me so much about the act of being thankful itself. It really is a conscious act, not a passive state of being. It's something I have to remember to do, like picking up fallen bits of cereal from my kitchen floor, before they entice the ubiquitous ants in my hundred-year-old house. It's also a decision, a choice. I've been surprised lately by just how supple life can be in the hands of someone who makes decisions instead of just floating along on the currents of circumstance. My therapist once told me that faith itself is a decision.

I've also learned that being thankful is not the same as picking the marshmallows out of Lucky Charms (speaking of cereal!). It's not about looking for particular objects, people, or events in my life that meet my personal standards of happiness and ignoring everything else. What if nothing meets those standards at the moment? At its core, I think true thankfulness is the unconditional embracing of everything that comes our way, good or bad. It's leaning headlong into both joy and misery, instead of pretending one or the other doesn't exist. It's allowing ourselves to feel anything, and rejoicing in our emotional peaks and depths as signs of life intensely lived, like mountains and valleys in a landscape created with passion. I also think true thankfulness is one of the ultimate acts of faith--it requires trusting that not every question needs an answer, and that whatever we experience, good or bad, will somehow sand off our rough edges and give our stories more flavor.  

Once again, Leonard Cohen captures this idea far better than I in this explanation of his most beloved song, "Hallelujah" (in case you were wondering, no, I'll probably never shut up about Leonard Cohen):

"The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say: 'Look, I don't understand a f*****g thing at all--Hallelujah!' That's the only moment that we live here fully as human beings."

I found this on a web page composed entirely of incredible Leonard Cohen quotes, and as you can imagine, this was my response when I first clicked the link:

The particular quote I mentioned rings especially true in a society where nobody can seem to admit they're wrong and so many conflicts seem irreconcilable, a society whose battle cry is "How dare you be human!" This year, it's clear that we're more bent on dehumanizing ourselves and each other than ever. We continue to ignore our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs in favor of increased "productivity" at work and increasingly detached relationships, and it feels like every evil force in the world is showing its face at once--hate, fear, ignorance, dishonesty, you name it. All the little social, political, and personal bombs we've planted over the years are finally blowing up.

Another favorite poet of mine (and Leonard Cohen's) is W.B. Yeats, and according to my father, Yeats believed history was cyclical rather than linear. I haven't done much research to verify that, but it's an interesting thought. If history followed a cycle, I sometimes think it would look something like a pendulum, and that this year would be one of the great downswings. On the bright side, that means it's about to swing upward, which makes me hopeful for next year. Hopefully, a day will come when enough people get so tired of all the warring and hating in the world that they all sit on the pendulum of history and weigh it down, stopping the violent swinging once and for all. Hopefully, my friends and I will step out of the furnace of this year as better and brighter people. But until then, all we can do as we keep struggling to change the world and ourselves is draw enough breath, however ragged, to throw back our heads and say "Hallelujah!"