Gratitude is a warm gun with soft bullets that heal, not hurt

Last week, I promised to write to you about gratitude because I wasn't in the mood after a profound failure of our public transportation sent me spiralling into grudges and thoughts of revenge. 

There was not much gratitude in me then, unfortunately. But luckily, tides can change, and this week is different.

So, here it comes—my take on gratitude. It is entirely rewritten, and hardly anything left from the original one I started to write – because life happened.

Time on a train on Saturday night.

I was coming home from the CBD by train. For the first time in about a year, I was a bit tipsy – three sheets to the wind with this gentle breeze of two double brandys on my face after I missed one train and had to wait an hour for the next one.

I was grateful for the infrequent evening trains, which allowed me to use them as an excuse to indulge myself with the scarce (and expensive) intake of brandy.

The Scottish bartender was funny, a natural-born entertainer for Thistle Inn's thirsty customers. It was fun to chat with him and then step into my own little world to read emails with the hot waves of brandy burning away the remains of the day. I was grateful for everything that had happened to me that day. 

I participated in a tremendous Buddhist conference at our new, stunningly beautiful, purpose-built community centre, Whare Soka Buddha. I met my fellow enlightened ones, got some inner lights lit up by listening to them and then had a wonderful dinner with these people from all walks of life, sharing their stories, struggles and victories.

And finally, I was on a train on my way home. It was a perfect day, a perfect end of the perfect week on the perfect summer night despite the drizzle and a bit of chilly wind. 

Perfect comes from the collision of imperfect things that fit so well together that you fill the cracks with gratitude and make the whole life shine as new. It is your inner gold that makes this Kintsugi so perfect.

Then I saw a broken jar.

After sensing the joyful clunking of the train and minding my business, I became aware of loud noises coming from somewhere. My noise-cancelling EarPods were not strong enough to block the high-pitched shouting, and I moved my eyes from the darkening landscape to the harsh lights of the reality inside the train.

Three young girls, maybe high school age, were verbally attacking the conductor, an Indian woman in her fifties. The train came to a stop, but the conductor refused to open the doors for the girls, and one of them was like a spitting cobra behind her oversized sunglasses, reflecting the face of the conductor like a mirror. "I will call the police," shouted the conductor, tears running, making her face glittering painful light, and she ran past us to the front of the car, opened the door, and slammed it closed. 

Suddenly, silence fell. 

Nobody knew what was going on and what would happen next. Who started it, why, and how did it escalate to this standstill? We looked at each other dumbfounded under this volcanic ash of anger that erupted so suddenly.

"She was crying," whispered a teenage Māori boy to his friend on the other side of the aisle with such compassion in his voice that I could have hugged him.

The train driver came after a while, walked towards the girls and opened the train doors. Nobody said anything. The girls looked defeated, lost, and stupid when I saw them walking past my window.

And then the train continued its clunking again.

The conductor returned and checked the rest of the tickets, her cheeks still wet from tears. The teenage boys said to her, "It's OK". I could see how the conductor took a deep breath with some sobs and managed to smile at the boys.

I could see how her broken jar was fixed at least for a while by a simple two-word phrase, "It's OK". 

Observe, understand and use your gold.

The sincerity of those boys was touching. They were not throwing stones at the girls, nor were they blaming the conductor – they saw what happened and understood that it was unnecessary to judge, but the main thing was to help the conductor overcome the stressful situation. 

When I told this episode to a friend yesterday, she said that these conflicts are pretty frequent on trains and buses. The frontline staff has to deal with issues that the leadership avoids solving and that society cannot cure.

On one side – at the receiving end – are the conductors and drivers, and on the other are the frustrated, angry, and often ill-willed passengers. The young girls reflect the values of their families, and the same goes for the older passengers with their frustrations. There is no self-awareness or desire to understand, only a desire to escalate by throwing oil on the flames. Both ends of this stick are short.

Let's go back to the practice of Kintsugi.

We all have cracks – some are deeper and invisible; some are wide openings screaming our pain and suffering with deafening volume. In both cases, we often turn away and don't want to see, hear or know anything about those fractures.

Gratitude, the gold of the soul, can mend them, but only if we take action. Standing still and feeling grateful for what we have is a form of arrogance. It does not fix anything but gives us a false sense of superiority. That kind of gratitude remains solid, still valuable, but not helpful.

Compassion is the flame that melts the gold and helps us use it in the Kintsugi of life. The stronger our compassion is, the easier it is to feel grateful and help to heal even the deepest of hurts. Compassion urges us to say kind things, do nice things and understand others while we observe the world and become more aware of it and our part in it.

When I turned my eyes from the slowly dimming landscape of my cosy and tipsy mind towards what was happening around me, I could make eye contact with the conductor when she finally came to check my ticket and show her that I was grateful for her work. The boys said it all; I just needed to validate the message with my smile. And the conductor smiled back with her tired eyes – and I knew that gratitude is a verb.

Small deeds are the best seeds for your happiness because you don't need a big bag for them to carry and sow. At the same time, you can help to mend somebody's cracking soul.

So, this is my take on gratitude. What kind of Kintsugi moments you have in your life? Have someone poured their gold into your acing fractures, or when did you do it to fix somebody else?

Ngā mihi

Jussi

PS

Because last week was so hectic, there are no book reviews or articles. So, this newsletter is short and sweet, and I write it full of gratitude for you, dear readers, because without you, writers don't have life.