I am not the most in-touch friend there is. Not the most present family member. Can't say that I answer my phone every time some one I care about calls. Sometimes I don't even listen to messages.
I am, however, a profuse thanker. I thank cashiers for handing my receipt at the counter. I thank drivers for letting me in a lane. I thank babies for smiling at me. I guarantee that I have thanked friends and family many times for many things, at times leaving my folks annoyed like,
"bruh, you don't have to thank me for letting you breathe the air in my house or sit your ass on my sofa. That kind of comes with having you over, fool."What was revealed to me in meditation this morning is that giving thanks, giving real thanks as opposed to the polite niceties I do most of the time, giving thanks is about accepting the love people give to you. Thank you is an acknowledgement of the choice a person made to do some thing patient, something kind, something caring, something encouraging when they had the choice to do otherwise.
So even though I'm not always sure how to give thanks, the why is clear. To complete the good someone has done, to seal the deal on the compassion someone has given or sacrifice someone has made, you have to accept it. You have to let them know that you accept their love to close the circle and make their act an act of love, an act that increases the love in the world. Thank you means "I accept your love for me" and it is very, very important. And it gets deeper.
Without acknowledgement of all that has been done to make me who I am, I can never fully understand my own value. I can not understand what I mean to those who love me, who have loved me until I acknowledge what they have sacrificed, forgiven, and given to me. I can value everything special about myself, but value is actually a bargained for exchange. We shouldn't depend on the opinion of others to value ourselves, but to experience value there must be an exchange with anothe.
For example, you may love your house. You may value it at one billion dollars because you want to spend the rest of your life there. But anybody in real estate knows that a house is worth what someone will pay for it. And unless your house is a sky scraper in Mumbai, no one is paying $1 billion for it. Imagine Mukesh Ambani's skyscraper house in this picture, which is actually valued at $1 billion sitting in the middle of the desert. It might not be worth a dollar. The value of that skyscraper is in relationship to the city around it.
By comparison, Bill Gates mountain house is only valued at $135 million even though many of us would rather live on a mountain than in a sky scraper in the middle of a dense city. But part of the value of anything is in relationship to other humans. A mountain house, even if it would survive a nuclear holocaust, as secluded and glorious as it might be, won't be worth as much as a house that towers over a city, with all the amenities of city living at your finger tips. Value is a bargained for exchange, it depends on the choice someone has made or is willing to make. Love is no different.So today, I'm going to call my folks and say thank you for choosing to love me, for whatever specific form that love has taken. I'm not going to take all day and cry and sling snot over the phone. I may text. I may reach out on Facebook. But I will take the time to thank them for at least one specific act, one specific act of love they have shown me.
Now, 15 days before 40, I am not going to waste the great, thankful energy of this holiday gorging on food (well I might do a little of that) or arguing about the empty nature of American holidays or being mad that we didn't land on Plymouth Rock ("Plymouth Rock, landed on us") or deconstructing the hegemonic narrative of pilgrims and happy "Indians" having turkey... I'm going to roll with the tide on this one and holla at my folks and accept their love by giving thanks.
Ashe.
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