Gratitude Mindset 2: Radical Trust

  A second aspect of gratitude that I mentioned yesterday was the idea of radical trust; trust even when there are no more handrails to hold us or sustain us. I feel that this is a vulnerable place, in the sense that it means dying to the ways that a person feels more secure in their identity. However, radical trust seems to be necessary in order for a person to be open to receiving the universe as a gift.

   If a person is always using their hands to grasp onto something that is familiar to them--such as a sense of inner authority, of knowing, or even of being confident--they are not necessarily able to embrace new things. For this reason, it's sometimes necessary to let go of what one thinks they know to be close to what is not known. This is also a test of dying: how far can a person die to the familiar in order to embrace unfamiliarity? This is a test of radical faith. And I believe that life challenges people to slowly become more practiced in an art of letting go, by providing them with moments of uncertainty and doubt to see how they embrace these experiences. 

    What allows radical trust to happen? I think that it's trust that there is some higher cosmos that holds all sentient beings, even in the midst of the direst of situations. It holds sentient beings and guides them in their own particular stations in life. No sentient being is "left behind" as all are on a special journey of learning that is unique to their own struggles and conflicts.  When thought in this way, a person truly needn't attach to a specific identity: they can see themselves as fellow learners on a journey that is definitely going somewhere in a certain direction, even if they don't happen to know where it's going to lead at this point. And what happens when one embraces this idea is that one sees that life is a gift to them. They are receiving life as a gift in this now moment, and there is nothing else that is needed to qualify it as a gift because this moment has been made specifically for our own growth and learning.

Gratitude Mindset 1: The Best of All Possible Worlds?

 I have been exploring gratitude throughout my doctoral thesis, and I am beginning to wonder indeed how this practice can really penetrate into a daily philosophy. Some have talked about "growth" mindset, but what would a "gratitude" mindset look like? One principle I can think of is that, no matter what our situation happens to be, there is always a hidden good side to it, even in the face of confusion or disasters. Some have called this a "silver lining" in the cloud, but I think more can be said of it than simply having a positive attitude.

    Contemporary society, particularly advertising, seems to prime people to think of their lives as an evolution that proceeds from "bad" to "better" and, finally, to "best". Few people are able to, under these circumstances, frame their current situation as the best that it could be. In fact, I think that this attitude of seeing that this is the best of all possible worlds, must have fallen out of fashion since Voltaire satirized it in Candide. But there is merit in seeing that the position one is in now is the best of all possible positions. For one, it eliminates wishful thinking, wherein a person imagines all manner of possibilities yet does not reconcile themselves to the present one. Second, it allows a person to stop and really reflect on what is going well, and what can actually improve in and of itself, given time, without having to make enormous changes to one's lifestyle or situation. Thirdly, it allows for a fully and unequivocal trust that one is exactly where one needs to be in life, to receive life's lessons. This might be the beginning of a gratitude mindset, which I will describe in subsequent entries.