Perhaps it was synchrony. On the same day that the Pfizer vaccine was approved by the FDA, the daily Covid-19 death toll in the United States exceeded the death toll from the 9/11 attacks. This concurrence was like an instant Rorschach test. How do we process such deeply contradictory simultaneous events? Is there something helpful to learn?
We all had somehow accustomed ourselves to the death tolls from the pandemic. We had watched as the daily death count, that horrible number that got posted every day and carried in boxes and chyrons on all our screens, rolled on, breaking the 1000 death mark, then 2000, and on and on. On December 10th, 2020 that number was 3127 dead Americans. The toll surpassed the deaths from Antietam, the San Francisco Earthquake, and Pearl Harbor. Now, 9/11. Those one-day totals would be surpassed again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. For anyone who remembers 9/11 and the depths of the national trauma, repeating that loss anew day after day, for a hundred days or more, was incomprehensible.
In that moment, the staggering death estimates from the spring that had been impenetrable were now merely quotidian. I felt an emotional surrender to the utter vastness of death and despair.
We also knew that one or more vaccines were on their way. There was a reason for hope. But somehow that small ray of optimism hadn’t quite landed in my heart until the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine on December 10th.
That made the difference.
I could hear “Here Comes the Sun” playing in my mind. The world was brighter. I could see things I had been blind to before. I sat at my desk staring at a largely empty calendar and realized, for the first time in too many months, that I could plan events for the coming summer. I felt the joy of having an invigorating future to contemplate. I realized I could be active in the coming months. I would travel, see my daughter, teach in person, give and receive juicy hugs.
It’s a terrible thing to lose the future, and that is what has happened to so many of us in these pandemic times. Like everyone else, I kept saying that I was waiting for life to return to normal, but that didn’t accurately express what I felt.
I wanted something qualitatively different than a return to normal. I wanted to project myself to times yet to come, to new places, and old friends.
We want to contemplate our future and fall into the inchoate dreams of our future selves. We want to live with the purpose of getting to that not so distant place I call this coming summer.
Was this gratitude? I never jumped on the gratitude train. It felt like homework to me, and every evening when I was supposed to make that list, I found something else more interesting to do. In that moment, though, I was genuinely grateful that there was a future outside the cossetted walls of my home. Was it time to reconsider the possible rewards of a gratitude journal?
There are enormous benefits to training your mind to register gratitude for the positives in your life. The more you write them down, the more you wire your brain to recognize gratitude, and thus the more you receive the trainload of benefits, the increased self-satisfaction, stronger immune system, better sleep, more empathy, the whole beneficial package.
Yes, I am grateful that there is a vaccine. I am grateful that we all will finally put these lost seasons behind us. I am grateful many times over.
But gratitude was only a piece of what I felt. The sun came out when I looked at my empty calendar and realized I could fill it in. I made notes and when I looked at my big pad of scribbles, I didn’t see a gratitude list. I saw a to-do list.
· Find interesting conferences.
· Decide subjects to teach.
· Develop course materials.
· Chose optimal locals.
· Travel to the beloveds I have missed so much.
This is a worklist, a syllabus for activity. It is planning. It gave me joy, I realized, because it is a purpose.
Though I knew there were myriad benefits to a gratitude practice, it has limits. It makes short shrift of deeper questions. It can paper over what caused your discomfort and slow down real healing. There’s no room and no focus for attention to the causes of discomfort or the messages from your unconscious to delve deeper. It keeps you in the present and stationery. It lacks the depth I sought.
Gratitude promotes incremental satisfaction. It’s a good tool, but what if your situation is more dire than that, or your distance from the you you would like to be is too far to cover with incrementalism? Is there a better tool?
Purpose can be that tool. The rich body of modern information on the singular importance of purpose can be traced back to the original release of the book A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp, anonymously written by an Auschwitz prisoner who survived by concentrating on the purpose he had to see his loved ones again. After he was freed, he discovered that his wife, father, mother, and brother all died in the camps. Nevertheless, he credited that purpose with not just saving his life, but allowing him to thrive thereafter. Fortunately for all of us, he changed the title to Man’s Search For Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962) and Victor Frankl went on to see his remarkable work benefit millions of people.
I don’t know if a gratitude list can get you through the horrors of a concentration camp, but Frankl proved that having purpose can do it. Looking at my empty calendar and developing that to-do list illuminated my purpose, and that changed everything for me. It hurled me into my own future. It asked questions I know are worth asking, got me actively involved in my own future, and thus made me more optimistic about my own life. It gave me definition and direction.
I wanted to fill that calendar with my favorite things. I love teaching. I love meeting my fellow writers and sharing stories from our souls. I’m thrilled when newbies share pages and with a few comments they can glimpse not just what their writing is, but where their writing will take them. Writing is such a solitary craft, but when we share that product that seems to come out directly from our soul and onto a page, then we meet each other at the exhilarating overlap of our souls. We don’t lie on the page. We just can’t. What we write is always from our depths, even when we don’t want it to be, and it is a place to share with our beloveds, including the beloveds you’ve never met.
That is why I teach and why I write.
Why do you write?
Leave a comment here or visit my website to let me know!
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