gratitude : mackenzian

November 25, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Quote: David Whyte on gratitude

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given. Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event; it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.” —David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

A few years ago, a friend parsed the differences between gratitude and appreciation for me. Gratitude, he said, was often anchored to past events and material experiences. Appreciation, however, wasn’t time-bound or thing-bound: it was the context in which we grasped and valued sheer being.

In a state of appreciation, we’re more open to life and to all the experiences and things that might come with it. We’re disinclined to impose meanings on the present or the future. We’re not stuck in guilt, debt, or fear, and so we can hold whatever is with a light grip.

What Whyte calls gratitude seems closer to my friend’s appreciation than anything else: appreciation and attention, awareness and presence.

We don’t need holidays to practice this anymore than we need Lent to transcend oppression and excess. Every day, if we choose, we can practice living from this state. But the collective intention of a holiday is an easy opportunity. Don’t let it slip by you this week.

October 20, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Why I write (Also, thank you)

Last fall, I spoke to the Society of Adventist Philosophers about how the Adventist community handles “the word” and how our commitments to literacy and logos influence our approach to informing, persuading, and communicating.

Working on that paper sent me trekking through the library of Plato, especially the Phaedrus dialogues where Socrates and his interlocutors explore what the new art of writing might mean for older forms of rhetoric and other arts, like memory.

Socrates here is a writing skeptic, and we know this only because his student Plato frames him as such in writing. Because of Plato, we get to enjoy Socrates, even if our dear teacher once thought we’re not “the right sort of people” because we write:

In the garden of letters, [he who knows the just and good and honourable] will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write [thoughts] down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.” —The Phaedrus

Thousands of years post-Plato, we’re still writing things.

More: I’m writing. A descendant of a people once explicitly barred from writing and other language arts is writing. I’m writing a lot, stretching my ability, testing my discipline, hoping that I improve in the process, trusting that the people who most need the Word behind the word will catch it in these words.

I write for so many reasons.

At the top of the list: I write because I can. I’m feeling a rush of gratitude to my parents who conspired to teach us writing for information and writing as craft. My mother made Mummy Writes What I Remember journals for my siblings and me, and she sat with each of us almost daily, recording what we could recall until we were old enough to train our attention and write our memories for ourselves.

Mum’s diligence meant that I was writing well before I went to school: no later than the age of four. A decade later, my father let me loose on his calligraphy set, reviewing my attempts to form pretty letters. I didn’t train long enough to master the art, but it hasn’t stopped me from seeing writing as a craft and not a mere utility. Thanks, Mum. Thanks, Dad.

Next on the list: I write because I should. Writing has been part of almost every job and trainee role I’ve ever held: legal assistant, opinion writer, editor, teaching assistant, parliamentarian, editor again, graduate assistant, policy writer, grant writer, rhetorician, technical communicator, still-an-editor, researcher, contractor, fundraiser, program manager, writer-who-speaks-too, consultant and business owner, communications coordinator, and program director.

Writing is the tool I use to cast visions and reshape organizational matter at the levels of the work unit and the funding request. I use it to articulate what my colleagues and I are all about, to imagine what more we can become together, and to connect us with the communities around us.

Writing is also the tool I use to recover from organizations behaving badly. Whether I write privately or publicly, writing is my means of making sense of the insensible and nonsensical so I can still show up at the common table open-hearted. I don’t mail every letter or send every email—thank God—but I still write!

And finally: I write because I must. About a month ago, I shared with one of my communities how societal silences shaped my early sense of who I was and how I fit into my ethnic, religious, and national cultures. I wrote about growing up not seeing my whole self in the mirror of these cultures; I wrote about what it has meant for me to discover affinity communities as an adult through fictional and nonfictional literature. Writing, others’ writing, allowed me to encounter them and therefore encounter myself.

Today, writing is how I carve my own reflection into my cultural mirrors. Writing is the way that I reshape that early story and make new endings out of it. Writing is what I offer the world, no matter what, in the hope that young ones as young as I once was will have at least one more reflection in their mirrors, one more token of their peer group and the communities beyond the kin they can touch.

I write because some of you still want to read. I also write regardless of whether any of you ever want to read.

But I’m glad that you do read.
Thank you.

October 10, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Appreciative inquiry and honoring what’s present

A metal-framed pair of oval glasses sits on a wooden table. There are deep shadows in the background. — Photo credit: Mel Beylon

I’ve reached that stage in life where I sometimes look for things I already have: the glasses I’m looking at the world through, the cell phone I’m making a call with, the car keys in my pocket.

It’s hilarious.

And it’s instructive, mostly because it has little to do with age and lots to do with attention.

How do we honor what’s already present in our lives? How can we practice the kind of appreciation that enhances our awareness of the skills and resources available to us? And how could acknowledging the good that’s already around us help us to become even more effective wherever we are and whatever we’re working on?

Appreciative inquiry is a formal method for recognizing existing resources and the potentials they make possible. For nearly thirty years, it’s supported non-profit organizations and businesses in releasing critical auditing or assessment methods and taking a more open, constructive approach.

Traditional critical methods often ask what’s missing and who’s not here rather than what’s already on the table and who among us could have more to share if given the opportunity. By contrast, appreciative inquiry invites users to discover what’s present in an organization or community, dream about that group’s potentials, and design ways to draw those potentials to the surface.

In the context of sufficiency, appreciation becomes a powerful, intentional practice of creating new value through our deliberate attention to the value of what we already have. Our attention enlarges and enriches our experience of whatever is before us.” —Lynne Twist

So appreciative inquiry can help us to revise our views of the status quo and, with that, revise our sense of our options too. In contexts where we might not immediately be able to fix issues by throwing new people, new funds, or new shiny gadgets at them, we can do so much more when we’re willing to fully appreciate what we’ve got.