The Slow Way: On Gratitude and Maturity

Here is our life. Are we in a state to receive it?

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

I posted a video Friday on Instagram about a friend of mine who picked up Ace from his therapy Monday night as a favor. Later, she told me that as they walked to the car together she said, “Ace, your mom has told me all about the words you’re spelling and how proud she is of you! I’m so excited for you and all the things you know.” She said he gave her a long amount of eye contact (no small thing for Ace), and a very big smile. Then he took her hand.

This is a story about Ace’s response to being seen for who he is, and being known as someone who is more than a disabled body. Ace spends most of his life being discounted and babied. What Jenn gave him that night was another adult who sees him as an individual with abilities and knowledge and maturity.

My friend’s response to Ace in that moment came from conversations I’ve had with her about the work Ace and I have been doing together this fall to build his ability to express himself. I will write about this season in our lives more fully in years to come, I’m sure. But the past two months have been revelatory for me as Ace’s mom. I have peaked into his mind and his inner life in the smallest of ways through a new communication tool we’re learning together. It’s still early to give you more information than that. But I will say I have been amazed to learn what Ace perceives in the world, what he already knows, and what he has been absorbing all these years when he appeared to be unengaged.

Ace presents as a person separate from the world. He doesn’t follow the social norms. He doesn’t greet the adults who speak to him. He doesn’t sit nicely. He doesn’t keep quiet. He makes noises that all of us “regulars” have been conditioned to hear as evidence pointing toward separateness and weakness. When adults meet my ten year old, ninety percent of them speak to him like he’s a toddler.

In the training Ace and I have been doing together, he is learning and responding to lessons that were designed for his age and above, and he understands far more than I once believed.

The first time we sat down with the woman training us in this system, she said to him, as if she were speaking to a peer: “Ace, we’re going to learn something new, and it’s going to be hard. But I already know you’re smart, so I’m not worried about whether or not you can learn it. Are you ready?”

I think this was the first time anyone ever told Ace he was smart. He is beginning to believe it, and his belief in his abilities is changing everything.

The Ultimate Virtue

It’s Thanksgiving week, and I want us to consider gratitude, what Ronald Rolheiser calls the “ultimate virtue.” He calls it “synonymous with holiness,” and maturity. “We are mature to the degree that we are grateful.” We all see this so often in our lives, don’t we? The immaturity of people we know or encounter who have so much but don’t seem to see it. Folks who work frantically and are never satisfied enough to stop. And we observe it in ourselves. We who don’t recognize the gift of health until sickness arrives, or our bodies break down. Those of us who have food on the table every night but who can’t seem to notice the gift and rarity of abundance in the course of human history. How do we become more grateful, and as a result, more mature?

I believe that gratitude has been the most important way I’ve been able to survive the challenges of my life. Gratitude is a practice, yes. It’s a spiritual practice, a work of reimagining our own experiences, looking for the good. And it does what all practices do for our brains: it rewires them. Gratitude changes how we cultivate maturity in our lives.

I love that Thanksgiving week provides a ritualistic way to cultivate gratitude as a community. But of course, we can sit down to a feast without truly experiencing gratitude in our spirits. In fact, in order for gratitude to change us, we need to search for it in every area of our lives. It needs more attention than one holiday! But when we nourish its presence within us, gratitude actually transforms our brains, our neuropathways. Gratitude leads to maturity by first changing the ways our minds literally function.

In an interview in the Holistic Education Review in May 2021, Parker Palmer spoke about his work of tapping into gratitude through “God’s work manifested in the natural world. My inner work as a human being is to open my receptors to it in every season, to be able to see that which is always there.” In my decade in San Francisco, I found that I struggled with the feeling of being disconnected from the seasons, something that my dear friends who had grown up in California or even a different climatic part of Texas didn’t experience. I needed to see fall do its fall thing, and feel cold and miserable in the winter, so that I could truly embrace the blooming peonies in spring. Without the the natural world as a reminder of where I stood in the calendar year, my body was unsettled.

Since being back on the east coast for the past five years, I’ve found it immensely helpful to experience Thanksgiving as something that arrives just as the trees are almost bare and the nights are beginning at 4:30 pm. It’s dark and cold right now, and getting colder. And it has been important for me to see this as a necessity for my work of gratitude.

Gratitude As Receiving Our Lives

Palmer spoke in the same interview about how gratitude for the rhythms of the natural world has been an important part of his spiritual practice: “The question is, ‘Am I in a state to receive it?’ If I’m not, I’ll feel cut off. I’ll feel despair. I’ll feel destroyed by the winter to come. But if I can receive it, I will always see it. And so, a spiritual discipline for me is cultivating gratitude in the simple sense of opening my heart, and my mind, and my eyes, and my hands, my whole body, to the beautiful in our world.”

One of the transformative changes in my parenting of Ace in the last few months has been in recognizing that he is listening and absorbing everything that is said around him, no matter what his body appears to be doing. For most of his life, I have talked about him in front of him, not including him in the conversation, because I’ve assumed he wasn’t listening or even able to process, and because he has always been unable to reply. Usually, he’s in the room stimming or making noises or swaying or focusing on something else besides whatever conversation I’m having. But this season of our lives Ace has revealed to me that he doesn’t need to appear to be listening to be listening. And actually, his auditory intake is off the charts. He has processed everything all along, and his body has kept him from being able to show us.

What does this have to do with gratitude? I find that I am not only reexamining how I respond to my kid because of the changes of the last two months, but my response to my son is also changing his view of himself. He is learning something that is working for him, that is showing me what is inside him, what has always been inside him. My new understanding of him doesn’t change who Ace has always been. But the connection we share has transformed because I am understanding it.

I think this is a metaphor for what gratitude can do. The circumstances in our lives don’t change because we learn to be grateful. But our connection to our stories, our bodies, our minds can certainly change. Gratitude reworks the ways we experience who we are, and what has happened to us. Just as Ace is who he has always been, and now has found a way to begin to begin revealing himself, I believe gratitude offers us that path to a deeper knowing of our lives, no matter the pain we’ve lived through.

As Palmer says, “Am I in a state to receive [my life]?” Of that process he explains, “I will get in tune with stuff that is fundamental, and be more likely to see the eternal secrets hidden in plain sight.” The eternal secrets hidden in plain sight are available to all of us through the gift of gratitude. And that’s we’re invited to as well as we learn to do the work of receiving our lives as they are.

This week as we practice gratitude with people we love, let’s ask ourselves Parker’s question: Here is our life. Are we in a state to receive it?

A Slow Practice

In his book of poetry Readings From The Book of Exile we find wisdom from Padraig O’Tuama on the winters of life, and the gift of gratitude to guide us toward maturity.

Spend some time reading through this portion of O’Tuama’s poem “The Facts of Life,” asking the Spirit to speak to you through the words.

…That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes even better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constricting.

That you will probably be okay.

Close your time by thinking or journaling about these questions:

• What are the structures in my life that constrict me?

• In what ways may they not be permanently constricting?

• Where is an area of my life that I am currently not grateful for and how might I follow Parker Palmer’s example “cultivating gratitude in the simple sense of opening my heart, and my mind, and my eyes, and my hands, my whole body” to this area?

• How do I sense gratitude leading me to deeper maturity in a specific area of my life?

Close your time with prayer, using your sacred imagination to engage the more difficult challenges of your life with gratitude.

A List of Things:

• I am co-hosting a virtual Advent Writing Workshop with my friend and fellow author, Cara Meredith, and I’d love for you to be there!

  • What is it? An opportunity to pause, reflect, and create as we move toward Christmas. We’ll spend two hours together, focusing on Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. We’ll read and discuss bits of prose and poems that will inspire our own written responses. If you are a writer or just someone looking for a way to slow down and process the season, this is for you!

  • Cost $30

  • Sign up here

• We at The Lucky Few Podcast have been focusing this season on the brain and Down syndrome. It’s been one of my favorite seasons so far, focusing on motor planning (which affects every part of my life with Ace), the giant looming reality of Alzheimer’s and Down syndrome (95 % percent of adults with DS will eventually be diagnosed. And this epidemic rarely enters the cultural conversation around Alzheimer’s). This week we learned from an expert on trauma and intellectual disability, and those affected by disability need resources for psychological care. If this interests you at all, I’d love for you to take a listen!