For the past few days, I’ve started my morning in an abnormal way: taking a ballpoint pen and writing the same word on my wrist in the same place it washed off from the previous evening’s shower:
It’s a word I only learned recently, but has stuck deeply ever since. In the language of the Shuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, it evokes an all encompassing spirit of gratitude for the gifts of life. A breath of Mákete reminds us that, even in the hardest of times, we still have so much to be grateful for.
I wrote in my first update about some of the habits I’ve built over the past year to integrate my learnings and accelerate my growth. In the past few weeks, I’ve faced a dilemma that I share with much of the human race: what to do when many of those habits are no longer possible?
Two weeks ago, as the reality of social distancing started to settle on San Francisco, I had a beautiful experience which taught me how vitally important our social habits are to the rhythm of life. We are not simply people, we are *a* people, and our lives are meant to be spent together in harmony with each other. This harmony, after decades in decay, is now under extreme duress. We’re being reminded in the strongest terms possible how much we actually need each other, but our normal mechanisms of support now linger out of reach.
Receiving a profound reminder of the importance of community at the very moment it seemed to slip away was heartbreaking, and I spent a few deeply sad days wondering how my new, improved, but still so very fragile self was going to survive. What would it mean to spend most of my days seeing at most one person? How would I replicate the shared energy of a hundred people in a yoga practice? Or the same twelve people in a fitness class? Would my mental health survive months without seeing my friends or family? Or without the possibility (which, upon reflection, has driven me for my entire adult life) that I might find a partner tomorrow?
Then I remembered Mákete.
I remembered to be grateful that I am human, adaptable, and resilient. For the people around us, who demonstrate acts of courage, humanity, and selflessness every day. For the comforts of modern life, which include the miraculous ability to be connected (live, via high definition video, even via cameras which track movement in real time!) with anyone and anything in the world at the click of a button.
Even more, I remembered to be grateful for the beauty of life itself. After a particularly gray morning last week, the fog burned off and the sun broke through the clouds to reveal a brilliantly blue sky, against which the swaying palm trees that flank my view of Twin Peaks were just as San Francisco as before. An early, socially distanced, hike to the top of Bernal Heights revealed that the Golden Gate Bridge looked as brilliant as ever against the backdrop of the Marin Headlands.
The more I repeat the mantra of gratitude the more I receive in return. The ability to do a yoga practice in my living room via Zoom seems like a miracle instead of a workaround. Connecting with my mom and stepdad via Portal twice daily feels like we’re more together than ever, even as they had to cancel their planned visit to be here in real life. Even if I only see my brother in a given day, I’m filled with gratitude that we get to live together. I’m grateful to see how the people around me, near and far, have given so much of themselves in support of our common humanity.
Gratitude for this amazing, incredible, inexplicable life is really its only meaning: to marvel in how unlikely everything is and how lucky we are to experience it. But it’s so easy to forget — I forget it like 100x daily. I forget it when I read the news, when I hear of people who have been touched by the virus, or when I even think of the President. I forget it when I’m feeling cramped, or annoyed, or anxious. I forget it when I think about the future, how uncertain it is, and how much pain we still have in store. Forgetting to be grateful is the first step in surrendering to these thoughts, which is a quick ticket to suffering.
So I write this word on my wrist every morning as a reminder to be grateful that I’m human, adaptable, resilient. That I can create new habits to sustain me. That, despite our physical distance, we’re still connected, in many ways more than ever. That I’m still here, breathing, just as I always have been. Just a glance at my wrist reminds me to think of at least one thing I’m grateful for — when this is all over, I’ll plan on having it tattooed permanently.
Today, I’m grateful to you, for reading this, and for being here with me through this challenging time. May we get through it together.
Mákete.
I love this Jamie