I am a grateful person
If I say this, it's usually immediately followed by the question: 'For what, then?' That reveals something about the way we have learned to think. In our first perception, gratitude must have a thought-content, a reason. Grateful – Why so? Why?
Our first perception is that of a personality raised in a society in which wisdom has become detached from its foundation in love, and has thereby undergone a narrowing. Wisdom has come to coincide with its instrument in this dual world: thinking. Hence we almost automatically ask about the 'why' of things. We have learned to approach everything, in the first instance, causally.
Causal thinking is of course fine, even indispensable. The question is not whether we use it, but whether we have the free choice not to use it as well. And that is precisely the point: we have unlearned that freedom over the course of many centuries.*
Our programming has gone the other way. For most people, only what is cognitively demonstrable counts as real. What an impoverishment.
If we go back to our heart,** to before the narrowing, we experience something infinitely richer. I am a grateful person. Not for some reason. Not despite something. I feel that now. In every cell, in all my pores. Full stop.
In ons hart herkennen wij ons zelf als liefde en wijsheid — niet één, niet twee.
When we learn again to let our rigidified wisdom rest for a moment and give direct attention to the love within us, we experience this: pure gratitude. No cause, no effect. Only this: this one breath, gratitude, now, here, everywhere, in me, around me. As I remember this psalm:***
You have searched me and known me,
You know my sitting down and my rising up,
You discern my thoughts from afar,
You search out my going and my lying down,
With all my ways You are acquainted.
For there is not a word on my tongue,
But behold, You know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
You have laid Your hand upon me.
This is too wonderful for me to grasp,
Too lofty, I cannot attain it.
If I ascend to heaven, You are there,
If I lay myself down in the realm of the dead, behold, You are there,
If I took the wings of the dawn,
If I went to dwell at the uttermost part of the sea,
Even there Your hand would guide me,
Your right hand would hold me fast.
My Christian youth turns out, in my old age, to be a repeatedly surprising source of blessings. When I speak these words aloud to myself, I am there again, I am that little girl again, who knows herself cherished, without asking herself how or what, in God's safe arms.
God as presence.
Love that carries and wisdom that fathoms.
Tat tvam asi. You are That.****
I am That.
Gratitude and surrender.
*Zie mijn boek Veilig zonder adres (verschijnt november 2026)
** Zie mijn boek The Flower (2022)
***De Bijbel, psalm 139, vrij naar de vertaling van 1951.
****Eén van de beroemdste uitspraken uit de Indiase traditie (Chandoga Upanishad, ontstaan tussen de 8e en 6e eeuw v.Chr.).