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It’s easy to be thankfull when things are going well or as hoped. It is yet another thing to maintain a sense of appreciation when one is in the midst of difficult life circumstances. So at this time of thanksgiving, as we ponder the year’s “harvest”, i might ask you all to contemplate a few things before concluding that it was either a good or bad year. My first admonition is to not think of things as being inherently “good’ or “bad”.  I frequently ask people (probably to the point of being completely annoying) to utilize terms such as ‘difficult”, “challenging”, “painful’ and so on to refer to life circumstances in contrast to such absolutest and judgemental terms as “good’ or “bad”.  For me personally, i can acknowledge that this has been a very emotionally painful year due to some undesired life circumstances that occured. However, painful though it was, I recognize that it would be foolish to conclude that therefore the things that I didn’t want to happen it should not have happened. Though the pain is still relatively fresh, enough time and healing has occured such that i can already recognize some of the growth that has occured, not just despite the pain, but actaully because of it.

Thanksgiving in the face of pain

Guru Ram Das in his wonderful film “Fierce Grace” , discussed the immediate impact of having sustained a severe cerebral vascular accident or stroke at a particularly inconvenient point in his life. he was readying to embark on a new series of lectures and travel t promote some of his favorite causes. As he comically stated, “I had plans!. Stroke wasn’t in these plans”. He went on to say that over the gradual course of time, he began to develop a different relationship with his stroke. eventually, he even came to see it as a blessing or grace. In his words, “I was stroked”. He came to see it as a cosmic intervention, a stroke of grace, which ultimately served to catapult his spiritual progress and development.

The discipline of psychology formerly looked at life stress as a cumulative measure of difficult or challenging life changes. And so if you scored high on The Life Events Scale, then ostensibly, that should predict unhappiness or physical illness. However research showed that was only somewhat true. Other personal factors and variables are seen as playing critical roles in mediating the relationship bewteen difficult life events and ones’ emotional or medical response to such events. The psychology literature has identified such various traits as “optimism”, “transformational coping”, “hardiness”, “radical acceptance” to name but a few, as important factors which help determine one’s adaptational resilience in the face of hardship. having a spiritual belief system sound perceived social support, ability to communicate one’s feelings and needs or other important factors that help determine resilience.