There Is No Better Day for Wonder
To regain our appreciation of Thanksgiving, we must first recover what it means to experience, and teach, gratitude.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
It’s no accident that Thanksgiving is just a speed bump (and a low one at that) in the race toward Christmas. As good as marketers, salespeople, and promoters are, they just can’t make money off a day geared towards gratitude.
It’s true that we have Black Friday, which this year has been ongoing for at least two weeks already, but this day is about Christmas, not Thanksgiving. Which proves the point. When it comes to giving thanks and being grateful, we struggle.
There are any number of things to blame – consumerism, social media, commercialism, the National Football League, the internet, the 24-hour news cycle, pick your poison – but the reality is we simply don’t teach gratitude very well. When we ceased doing it and why is less important than understanding our failure, appreciating the importance of teaching gratitude, and beginning to rectify the problem.
Teaching gratitude, however, is not a simple or straightforward task.
To teach gratitude, one must first embrace and appreciate the twin concepts of faith and wonder. Gratitude grows from our connections to each.
If this seems an odd observation from a self-avowed agnostic who leans toward atheism, remember that faith is much larger than the strictures of religious practice. Faith is bounded when we express it only through an understanding of god; faith becomes unbounded, however, when it is in harmony with our sense of wonder.
And wonder, like faith, is something we seem to be in short supply of these days.
We can quantify this decline by looking at polling date in America’s faith in its public institutions, notably government. Pew Research has been tracking this since Eisenhower was president in 1958, and save for a few blips, America’s faith in the system and wonder at its ingenuity has been mostly declining.
Government isn’t the only arena this is happening.
In education, trust in public education has only climbed north of 50% twice in the past 25 years, according to Gallup. This coincides with the rise of high-stakes standardized testing and a relentless focus on filling young minds with “facts,” as opposed to developing their ability to wrestle with complexity.
This shows most graphically in the humanities, where we’ve traded poetry, history, expository writing, and deep discussion for an unholy cross between the Indianapolis 500 and a game of Trivial Pursuit. We demand that teachers drive relentlessly from one fact to another in order to get from A to B in as short an amount a time possible because “THE TEST IS COMING!”
We could do similar analyses of other institutions and discover the same trends.
This collapse of faith in our public life and institutions has led to our stripping wonder from our lives. We’re so busy complaining about what’s wrong, in other words, that we fail to appreciate the beauty of what’s right. Imagine a person staring at Starry Night, and focusing mindlessly on the dead tree branch at the fore of the painting. Flawed, perhaps, if seen in isolation. Brilliance, when seen with a broader eye.
With faith and wonder, we’re missing the bigger picture.
In her new book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer helps us rediscover wonder. And in so doing, we can find our way, again, to rediscovering and teaching gratitude.
Kimmerer does this by exploring how her Potawatomi Nation roots find gratitude in something as simple as the Amelanchier – a family of berries that include Juneberries, Saskatoons, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplums, Sarvis, and Serviceberries.
Describing her experience picking berries, Kimmerer writes:
This pail of Juneberries represents hundreds of gift exchanges that led up to my blue-stained fingers: the Maples who gave their leaves to the soil, the countless invertebrates and microbes who exchanged nutrients and energy to build the humus in which a Serviceberry seed could take root, the Ceda Waswing who dropped the seed, the sun, the rain, the early spring flies who pollinated the flowers, the farmer who wielded the shovel to tenderly settle the seedling. They are all parts of the gift exchange by which everyone gets what they need.
This “gift-exchange” that Kimmerer describes creates in her Native American worldview “a culture of gratitude.”
“Our oldest teaching stories,” she writes, “remind us that failure to show gratitude dishonors this gift and brings serious consequences. If you dishonor the Beavers by taking too many, they will leave. If you waste the corn, you will go hungry.”
However, when we recognize and “enumerate” the gifts we experience, something else occurs. We develop a sense of abundance. And this sense is, as Kimmerer writes, “a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.”
What Kimmerer is expressing is simply learning to recognize and appreciate the gift exchanges that occur in our day-to-day lives, that make life possible. In so doing, we realize both the benefits we receive from the gifts of others, and the costs that we pay for those costs.
This is gratitude, which proves to be a more complex and nuanced idea than the simple act of being grateful — expressed so often this day by saying “Thanks.”
Today, raise the speed bump some, slow Christmas just a touch, and lean into the complexities and nuance of gratitude – a trait that, once developed, stays with us well beyond the holiday to become a life- and society-changing attribute.
And then, embrace the abundance before you.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Copies of The Serviceberry are available for sale at Riverby Books on Caroline Street in Fredericksburg.
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Happy Thanksgiving to all the Advance team! I am very grateful for the work you do, for the wonder that is Riverby Books, for the serviceberry bushes in my garden (planted 20+ years ago by a much younger me), for the University of Mary Washington, that still holds fast to the tenents of a liberal arts education, and for so many other things, including my son who is taking the road less travelled and majoring in the one liberal arts discipline and minoring in two others, down the road at Mr. Jefferson's University (Another person and place I am very grateful for).
At times, it can feel that darkness is all around us, that our institutions are failing us, and gratitude can be hard to find and harder to practice as we consider the world around us. We may feel helpless, as if there is nothing we can do as individuals to make a difference, to make an improvement in the status quo, but yet we can. We can each shine our own small, bright light.
Your light may flicker at times, it may nearly go out occasionally, but I can almost promise you that it will also attract other small flames and soon enough, a warm circle will grow and glow.
On Thanksgiving Day, I especially hope this is true for everyone reading this!
Thank you, Fredericksburg Advance, for this thoughtful piece that led me to reflect on my blessings today.