Not Broken But Simply Unfinished

On gratitude in unfinished times (with inaugural poetry for artistic emphasis)

When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never – ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.

Amanda Gorman — “The Hill We Climb”

Because of the millions of years passed in recent months, I have chosen to revisit and resurrect my gratitude project. On the weekiversary of an inauguration I did not watch. It is the exact perfect time to begin again my gratitude journey.

Over the next few weeks and months, I will share transcripts of conversations and essays published on my blog and elsewhere to join the gratitude chorus.

My original gratitude journey began during the 2016 presidential election cycle as a volunteer at Hillary Clinton’s Miami campaign headquarters. I needed to answer my doubts and fears with faith and connection. I started talking with people about gratitude — those I knew personally and those I knew only from their work. My questions were far-reaching as I sought to look deeply at the often agreeable but difficult-to-practice concept. Over the next few years, I conducted informal interviews with randomly selected participants. I spoke with an Air Force Colonel, a diplomat, a yogi/small business owner, a Cirque du Soleil performer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a union President, a New York Times best-selling author, non-profit leaders, endowed professors, and others — a truly insightful group. Sharing transcripts of the conversations is a long-awaited writing goal.

The courage to ask people to participate, to invite them into my heart — which was more necessary and difficult to conjure than I can explain and stood in direct opposition to my monkey mind, which repeatedly screamed, “No one wants to talk with you or hear what you have to say.” — propelled my gratitude investigation. A lot of “No” and silence surrounded the process of finding people with whom to speak.

The heart of my gratitude journey is the desire to find hope in dark times. Early on, I learned that gratitude gives hope muscle. I thought that if I could hear the words of those who lived lives based on service, creativity, and love, I might begin to develop a grounded theory of gratitude beyond my understanding of sporadic practice, frequent bouts of superficial positivity, and often disconnected words and actions.

My gratitude journey has included analyzing hours of interview transcripts, reading tons about gratitude, hobbling together gratitude lists, holding random conversations focused on gratitude, writing essays and blog posts after essays and blog posts about gratitude, and teaching a writing class focused on gratitude in a men’s federal prison.

Thinking about gratitude after years of studying wide-awakeness — an existential concept rooted in the idea we are in and of experience — a few things are clear.

Gratitude is both in and of experience. By that, I mean gratitude is an action that reverberates across meaning and contexts. Generosity multiplies a gift. Kindness magnifies the good. Grace builds compassion. Story creates connection. Reflection breathes understanding. Love builds justice and peace. Consider generosity, kindness, grace, reflection, and love as gratitude manifest.

Today, darkness has metastasized into something culturally and globally recognizable. (I could elaborate on the darkness, but why? We know it. We see it. We feel it.) The election result — having slogged brokenheartedly through much of the last 8 years, catching my breath intermittently to ask how we got here while trying to understand what we do now — broke my heart. I am not alone with a broken heart.

In the wake of last week’s inauguration, in which the closest thing to poetry I could see was a call for mercy from the pulpit of the National Cathedral, I want to revisit poems from past presidential inaugurations. Knowing my gratitude project began in the throes of the 2016 election cycle, grounding this project in presidential poetry feels like an aspirational, historic, and artistic place to start.

Few presidents have had poets read at their inaugurations: Kennedy — The Gift Outright, Robert Frost, Carter — The Strength of Fields, James Dickey, Clinton — On The Pulse of Morning, Maya Angelou, Clinton — Of History and Hope, Miller Willams, Obama — Praise Song for the Day, Elizabeth Alexander, Obama — One Today, Richard Blanco, and Biden — The Hill We Climb, Amanda Gorman. I turn to poetry when words fail. These poets remind me of possibility and hope as words fail.

Looking across the texts, they say something about gratitude in this moment. Each poet shares the hope that words can heal. Each poet communicates our flawed, scarred, and fearful history as the connective tissue that just might save us. Each poet speaks about promise and journey as an inclusive experiment in which we all must engage. I am grateful for the experiment we are. The experiment — the possibility of repair — must be a North Star forward. Each poem speaks in terms of a collective we. I am grateful for the unique and beautiful we we are.

Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”explains that we are a nation that is not broken but simply unfinished. Things feel very broken right now. It seems right to continue a discussion of gratitude by celebrating our unfinishedness. I am grateful for our unfinishedness in the way that I am grateful for learning from failures and starting again. I am grateful for our unfinishedness in the way that I am grateful for freedom and knowing that with freedom comes choice and power. I am grateful for our unfinishedness because it speaks to the fact our history does not bind us, we are committed to our tomorrows, and we are the powerful not yet.

I muster the strength to dust off my gratitude glasses and look at our country and world as they are and the promise of what they must become. I am energized. My task is to study gratitude and weave the threads of an almost decade-long search into a useful, hopeful, loving whole.

I don't know what today, this week or year or decade will bring? What I know for sure is that gratitude — real gratitude, the stuff of mercy, generosity, kindness, grace, story, reflection, and love — has never been more important. I am also sure that the work of gratitude is the long game. It starts now and is bigger than a writing project goal that has puttered along for years, elections that fire us up and require collective follow through, or singular, consequential, earth-shattering moments on which the future depends.