Thankfulness as generosity

Another post on the many manifestations of danaparamita, the perfection of generosity.  

My mother has been suffering from major health problems recently.  After a month in a nursing home, I am extremely thankful that she is healthy enough to be home once more, thankful that she can be in a warm and cozy space, thankful that she can once again sit in her chair and look out over the narrow strip of water that separates Alameda and Oakland.  

I want to write about a moment of thankfulness that she shared with me while she was still in the nursing home.  We were sitting calmly together, and in a very sweet moment after reading a story, she expressed with great sincerity how lucky she felt and how thankful she was.  She acknowledged that things could easily have been much worse.  She was thankful for what she did have of her health.  And she was so, so thankful for all the love she had in her life. 

Her expression of thankfulness was a great gift to me because it opened a space for my own.  My inability to find work as a history teacher despite years of hard work and complete devotion to the teaching path had driven me into an incapacitating depression.  As she expressed thankfulness, deep in my own body I could feel how right she was.  Her expression allowed me to fully feel how much I had to be thankful for despite feeling so unacknowledged and unsuccessful.  Thankfulness didn't get rid of that suffering.  But it did put it in a larger perspective, in which it wasn't such a big deal.  In depression we have trouble seeing outside of our suffering, and by focusing on it, allow suffering to overcome us.  In thankfulness, we focus on what is beautiful in life.  Suffering is real, but it is only part of the story.  Thankfulness shows us the other part. 

Giving thanks is seeing things clearly.  It is being present with reality.  It is loving.  It is a skill we can cultivate, a spiritual technique, a practice we can use to offer ourselves a more expansive view.  Thankfulness is spiritual because it allows us to enter into a deeper, more subtle and more perceptive relationship to this world.  If we practice the spiritual technique of thankfulness with sincerity we will see more clearly and love more deeply.  Giving thanks may start as a mental activity, but the mental activity serves to allow the body to become thankful.  We can feel and express thankfulness in the way we sip tea or touch another human being.  I imagine that bodhisattvas are beings whose bodies express love and thankfulness in each moment, and whose expressions of love and thankfulness open doors for others to be loving and thankful as well. 

Thankfulness is a form of danaparamita because when we are thankful, we are being generous to all beings.  People who give sincere thanks together develop love together and become dharma sisters and brothers.