Thoughtless. Grateful.
Two opposite concepts move into alignment
Thoughtlessness and gratitude. These two things are generally conceived of as opposites. If you are thoughtless, then you are not grateful. If you are grateful, then by definition you are thinking and are not thoughtless. The two concepts are in tension.
To be thoughtless means to have the capacity to do, provoke, or inhabit a situation without thinking. That is luxury. That is an expression of a margin, an insulation, to whatever might go wrong. And of a margin so wide that the thoughtless person can simply exist in it. We can take for granted that whatever happens, we will be alright, and things will turn out generally in our favor.
Sometimes that margin, that insulation, is unearned. That is when thoughtlessness is in tension with gratitude. But what if that margin is earned? What happens to our concept of thoughtlessness when it is an expression of a margin that is itself the result of hard work?
Then, we can be grateful for our thoughtlessness.
But what is gratitude? The ancient Stoics didn’t have a lot to say about it. Their general orientation to the world was that you should simply be happy that you don’t have it worse than you already do. All your siblings didn’t die in childhood? Be grateful. Not conscripted into military service? Grateful. Not enslaved? You won the best lottery.
They lived in a harsh world.
Modern Stoics have different problems. We live in a world where we are used to having everything, where access to care and resources, even imperfect ones, is the defining characteristic of our everyday lives. We have to work at being grateful simply because we are surrounded and immersed in so much abundance. Unlike the ancients, we do not live constantly at death’s door. We have margin. And we are frequently thoughtless about it.
The abundance of our resources is overwhelming. We have everything we need, except for a handful of items. And these few necessities stalk our every day lives and make us feel as though, even though we are not at death’s door, we might be soon. Their absence fills us with horror. We are anxious about them. Our anxiety makes us desperate for them. Our desperation makes us erratic, irritable, even violent. These resources are time, energy, and attention.
These were big, so abundant, and so common in the ancient world that the Stoics had little to say about them, except to not waste them. In modern life, we are told to be grateful for the other necessities we have, the ones that the ancients struggled for, but the irony is that time, attention, energy, those commodities we don’t have, are exactly what gratitude requires. So we have abundance, but not the capacity to be grateful for them. Because we lack the required conditions for gratitude. And so we struggle.
But what if we move our concept of gratitude away from those ancient things, accepting that we are thoughtless in our abundance? What if in our desperation we focused our gratitude on our margin? If we focused on the margin we did not earn, like all those resources the ancients didn’t have, that is not virtuous. We know this, and so, when we try to “count our blessings”, it frequently does not work. It feels empty, because it is empty. Those things are unearned. But if we focus on thoughtlessness that is earned, then the situation turns on its head.
Recently I have been hit with many challenges to gratitude.
My three year-old has been having a wicked sleep regression for a month.
We’re in the middle of a move.
My work has been tough.
Normal things, but piled on top of each other they make for quite a summation of challenges.
In the midst of this maelstrom, every night I head out for my run.
And every night I come home and my husband asks me:
“How was your run?”
I realized this week that every night for a month I have been able to reply:
“It was great.”
“It was awesome.”
“I felt so good.”
I have been having great runs. Truly great ones. In the middle of one of my life’s longest storms, I have been having fantastic runs, and I have not had to think about them.
The work that I did earlier this year on my form; the way that I’ve extended my mileage; the emphasis I have placed on my strength and flexibility, have started to come to fruition. Even my daily training runs, the ones that sometimes you just do because you have to have been fluid, painless, soaring. The challenging ones, I have fired through, more exhilarated at the end than at the beginning.
And in all of this, I have been thoughtless. That thoughtlessness is an expression of the margin that I have built up through hard work. I am grateful for it. I grateful that I have managed to earn the ability to be thoughtless, even in this one aspect of my life. It is freeing. It gives me the capacity to be a little more attentive to my life. It gives me energy. It cannot solve for time, but I accept that.
Gratitude for thoughtlessness. What a concept. What an opportunity. Go run.