Gratitude – Jeremiah Stanghini

Life is a Gift — and so is Suffering

A few weeks ago, there was a rather poignant interview that aired between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper. I didn’t see or read much of the coverage of it, but the thing that kept coming across my feed was the first thirty seconds of the clip below. And, in seeing the views on this video, it looks like a lot of people were touched by the moment:

You said "what punishment of gods are not gifts. Do you really believe that?" @andersoncooper, choking back tears, asks Stephen Colbert, as they discuss grief.

"Yes," replies the comedian. "It's a gift to exist and with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that." pic.twitter.com/p5rUUhZKxq

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) August 16, 2019

Here’s the first thirty seconds:

Cooper: You told an interviewer that you have learned to, in your words, ‘love the thing that I most wish had not happened.’ You went on to say, ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ Do you really believe that?

Colbert: Yes… it’s a gift to exist and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that.

Lots of folks are keying in on these thirty seconds and, naturally, there’s a lot in there to chew on. Colbert’s sadness is evident and Cooper’s empathy is very apparent as he asks the question, while choking back tears. To my eyes, it’s the 120 seconds that follows.

I don’t have the time to transcribe that bit at the moment, so I’ll just briefly summarize — Colbert talks about how important gratitude is for the things that have happened in your life, whether they are positive or negative. He’s focusing on the negative here because of the question from Cooper. He talks about how he realized the lesson of having gratitude for things that have caused him suffering, rather than learning the lesson. This is important to him and in watching it, you can feel that this is something that he feels deep in his bones. It’s not some intellectual exercise that he’s worked through to come to the conclusion that he must accept the bad with the good — it’s part of him.

With human existence, comes suffering, and Colbert believes that this suffering has allowed him to have deeper relationships with the people in his life who have also suffered. He feels like he can better understand where they’re coming from because he has had this very traumatic experience early on in his life.

The best part is his philosophy on life — wanting to be the most human — not the best human, but the most human. And since suffering is part of the human experience, he welcomes (maybe not welcomes), but he’s grateful for those experiences, too.

Do You Sign Your Emails With Intention?

Most people have some sort of email signature that is attached to every message they send. This can be helpful because it usually contains other contact information, relevant titles, associations, etc. While I can see the value (read: saving time, saving money) in this, I wonder if not signing your name at the end of emails may begin to foster an ambivalence to the content (or more importantly) the tone of the email?

A brief aside: Having spent time in PhD program, I became accustomed to the phrase, “that’s a dissertation topic,” and I’ve definitely kept note of that since. There’ve been a number of times since enrolling in business school where I’ve come across potential ideas for a dissertation. While I have no intentions (in the immediate future) to return to a doctoral program, I have a feeling that I may continue to see ideas in this way. My guess is that this is a positive attribute as it continually reminds me to think in terms of the scientific method. This digression was meant to point to the fact that I think it might be interesting to see some research on email signatures and the author’s ambivalence to the tone of the message. Back to the email signatures.

I wrote a post about a year and a half ago about the “whys” with regard to how I sign-off emails or messages. I’ve slightly changed the way I sign-off emails (no longer writing “love”), but the good intentions are still the same. My desire to ‘write it out’ each time is, in part, because in writing this word (gratitude) every time I send an email, it reminds me (if even for a millisecond) to feel gratitude. Similarly, when I write my name, it feels like — to me — as if I’m signing my name in ink to what I’ve said in the email. In so doing, I take a greater sense of ownership over the content of the email.

After my stint in business school has concluded and I’m back to working full-time, I wonder (hope?) that this inclination still remains.

Oprah Exudes Gratitude: “We Did It!”

Oprah's Final Farewell; Photo Courtesy: (Screengrab from The Huffington Post video link; No Copyright Infringement Intended) I didn’t have the chance to see any of the celebrity-studded final shows of The Oprah Winfrey Show nor did I have the chance to see her actual finale. I did, however, see this one article (the only one I’ve found of its kind), that had Oprah’s “final monologue.” There’s a 4-minute video in the article that I wanted to embed here for your viewing pleasure, but it’s un-embeddable (at least un-embeddable as far as my Internet know-how goes).

I have written out her final monologue, should you prefer reading to watching/listening:

Every single day I came down from my makeup room on our Harpo elevator I would offer a prayer of gratitude for the delight and the privilege of doing this show. Gratitude is the single greatest treasure I will take with me from this experience. The opportunity to have done this work. To be embraced by all of you who watched is one of the greatest honors any human being could have. I’ve been asked many times during this farewell season, ‘is ending the show bittersweet?’ Well I say all sweet — no bitter. And here’s why. Many of us have been together for 25 years. We have hooted and hollered together. Had our aha moments. We ugly cried together. And we did our gratitude journals. So, I thank you all for your support and your trust in me. I thank you for sharing this yellow brick road of blessings. I thank you for tuning in everyday along with your mothers and your sisters and your daughters, your partners — gay and otherwise — your friends and all the husbands who got coaxed into watchin’ Oprah. And I thank you for being as much of a sweet inspiration for me as I’ve tried to be for you. I won’t say goodbye, I’ll just say until we meet again. To God be the glory.

In watching the clip or reading this monologue, it’s hard not to see the gratitude bursting through. Oprah is grateful — through and through. She is grateful to have had the chance to do the work that she does. It beams through in this monologue, it beams through in the clip from the article I’ve linked to, and most of what I’ve read about her general mood about and around the final season is that she’s grateful. And don’t we all have some room to be a little more grateful?

The one thing that strikes me the most from the clip, (which is not included in the monologue), but when Oprah emerges backstage and is hugging her team, is the words she uses. She isn’t crying because it’s over, no. Oprah is saying, “we did it!” We did it. She isn’t mourning the loss of her TV show, she is celebrating the opportunity to have done it. She is offering gratitude for being able to have shared in something so great. She is thankful towards her team for helping her put together 25 years of television that won’t soon be forgotten. And why shouldn’t she be grateful. She’s had an awesome run as far as TV goes and she’s been at the top of influential charts for quite some time!

A young boy asks Byron Katie what she would do if someone she loved had just died, “Celebrate!” And why not, right? Sure there can be time for mourning, but there’s so much to celebrate. Katie lists a number of reasons as to why one could be happy for someone’s death (including: they can never be hurt again, they might get to be fertilizer to help something grow to help something else grow, etc.) Here’s another example in a blog post from Katie: “Death is a part of living.”

Bring it back to Oprah and gratitude and the last 2 minutes of the clip — you can feel the emotion when she says, “Awww we did it!” There’s so much heart in that exclamation. She’s truly grateful. I am grateful to have had the chance to see the last monologue of The Oprah Winfrey Show and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share it with all of you. What are you grateful for?

With Love and Gratitude

Anytime I write something to another person, I nearly always end the message with: With Love and Gratitude. I’ve been asked on a number of occasions why it is that I do this. I usually give people the abridged version (spreading joy) or something like that. I thought it would be good to have a post here explaining why it is that I use these four words to sign off on what I’ve said. Initially, I will refer you to two posts I have already written here having to do with the importance of our words & thoughts (for ourselves and for others).

Sometime during the summer of 2005, I had the chance to see the documentary, What The Bleep Do We Know!? Much of what was offered in the film was not new to me (given my unique exposure to many esoteric influences while growing up), but there was something that I found uniquely interesting about one of the clips from the movie that I’ve included here.

After watching the documentary, I was so happy that there was science being done to “back-up” the sorts of things that I already thought to be true. During the Fall of that same year, I was able to get a copy of Dr. Emoto‘s book: “The Hidden Messages in Water.” I didn’t want to take what the movie was telling me at face value, so I wanted to read his book. After reading his book, I was confident that there had to be something to the experiments he was doing. So this is half the story. The other half involves a piece of synchronicity.

At the same time I was reading about Emoto’s work, I happened upon an email (or maybe I stumbled onto the site, I really don’t remember exactly how it happened) regarding “The Go Gratitude Experiment.” The ‘experiment’ was all about Gratitude. I really enjoyed getting the “42 knew views on Gratitude” [spelling intended] and I still have the emails they came in. Some of the work by the Go Gratitude folks has shifted over to a new website (Blooming Humans), but from what I can tell, it’s essentially the same message: Gratitude matters.

After reading Emoto’s book and pairing it with the knowledge from the “Gratitude Experiment,” I was so pleased that I printed off a document containing the words “Love & Gratitude” filling the page in size 80 font and taped the words in different parts of my room. I put one on each wall, I put one on the face of the shelf just above where my computer monitor was and I even put some in my closet and drawers (why shouldn’t my clothes radiate Love & Gratitude, right?)

At first, I was a little shy signing off emails to people “With Love and Gratitude.” It didn’t necessarily feel appropriate to have the word “love” in certain kinds of emails. That word can be quite ‘charged’ for some folks, and I didn’t necessarily want to invoke those sorts of feelings when they were reading my email. Eventually, as I got into the habit of signing off emails “With Love and Gratitude” to people, it would sometimes just slip out when signing off emails that were of a more business-like nature. As this started to happen more and more, I began to realize that my initial trepidation was unnecessary. In fact, I began to relish sending emails to people as it allowed me the chance to say what I needed to say, with love and gratitude.

Since Emoto’s work was published, there have been a number of critics, which I suppose is to be expected, and some of them even raise important points. The clincher for me is Dean Radin. I’ve spoken about Dean Radin before a number of times on here. He is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and is the “author or coauthor of over 200 technical and popular articles, a dozen book chapters, and several books.” In 2006, Dean Radin (along with Emoto and other researchers) sought out to test the effects if distant intention on water crystal formation. They used a double-blind method (an experiment in which the experimenters and the participants both do not know which group is experimental and which is the control) and their results:

Results indicated that crystals from the treated water were given higher scores for aesthetic appeal than those from the control water (P = .001, one-tailed), lending support to the hypothesis.

A couple of years later, Radin set out to replicate the findings — again. This time, it was a triple-blind study. A triple-blind study is when the experimenters, the participants, and the evaluators, all, do not know who is receiving treatment and who is not receiving treatment. And again, their results:

Results suggested that crystal images in the intentionally treated condition were rated as aesthetically more beautiful than proximal control crystals (p = 0.03, one-tailed).

I had already believed the water crystal experiments to be true, but after reading the papers published by Radin, now I can be much more sure that they are true. So there you have it. Now you know why I sign-off my emails and comments with: