Gratitude - a prayer for humans

I was brought up to have a superiority complex. My father had the fortune of being born to parents who were deeply committed to their children and who worked hard to provide opportunity. They valued education highly. The son of a window cleaner, he progressed through grammar school and onwards to medical school. 

‘Just imagine,’ Dr Leek would say, ‘that the average IQ is 100. Just think of that!’ It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the science of averages. His point was that we (ie he and his academic brood of four children) were not just above average but, by golly, how terrifying it was that so many humans festered below. How did society actually function! 

 So imagine my daily surprise as I progressed through my twenties to find that humans are so various in the gifts and the riches that they bring to the world around them. It became a voyage of discovery that academic intellect, for want of a better expression, was a very narrow measure.

The many humans that I met who didn’t have a GCSE to their name taught me things, and seemed far better at life than me. Interactions time and time again, with people who didn’t necessarily fit the ‘superior’ bracket, opened my heart, and showed me how to be human. 

 As I embraced systems and ecological ways of thinking, I saw too that measuring atomistically* was, quite honestly, a fool's game. We are all part of something quite complex. To think that value lies in any one thing is fundamentally flawed; to think in human-centric value systems is worse still and possibly the reason the earth is in such a mess. Consider the apple tree that we think we should cut down because it isn’t a pear tree (‘I want a pear tree!’) - it is interacting in untold ways with its environment, both above and below ground. What nonsense to think we can make decisions over the value of something over one measure alone, and a measure that only relates to me, the very important human. 

I was struck by Stephen Unwin’s piece in The Byline Times that examines a passage in Virginia Woolf’s diary. The extract reveals a chilling point of view that runs as an acceptable undercurrent still in our society, that some i.e. a certain type of human should be allowed to value the worth of other humans. And don’t get me started on the double speak of the word ‘special’ that permeates our education system, a term that belies what people really mean - burdensome, defective, ill-fitting. And so much has been built on this way of seeing - which is defective in itself. Surely we should be embracing being with the humans that surround us, and think about building with what we have, and nurturing what we have been given. 

Whilst these value systems belong in the last century it will take so much to topple the decades’ weight of the ‘superiority complex’ that I had imbued in me from a young age. Stephen Unwin said on Twitter, ‘Still relevant I’m afraid’. Not only is it relevant, I’m not sure we’ve even really started. 

But back to gratitude. As the earth turns towards the sun once more, I find I am grateful for so many things, not least what my father has, through a kind of twisted kaleidoscope, given me. I grapple with all this as I sit by him, a man who has now retreated into the maze of Alzheimers. I may have had to invert what he taught me but that is no bad thing. I am because of him. 

Gratitude is, according to psychologists, writers, philosophers, spiritual leaders a tonic in our search for wellbeing and happiness. A nod to Alice Walker this New Year’s Day. ‘Saying thank you is the best prayer you can say’. 

It may sound topsy turvy but I am grateful, every day, for the blinkers that I was given. I am still peeling them off and what an adventure it is. 

*Atomistically - separating things out into bits, to examine and learn about them, when really, they can only be understood when considered as part of a complex whole. For more on systems thinking, read this book: The Systems View of Life, Capra and Luisi