Evanston RoundTable, Dec. 23, 2024
One of the many wonderful features of the annual Thanksgiving holiday, in addition to the food and the company, is the opportunity to express our gratitude. In many gatherings, people are encouraged to share what they are grateful for, to express love for those with whom they’re breaking bread and to give thanks for family, friends and other blessings.
What could be better? But gratitude shouldn’t be a one-and-done event. Is it possible to be grateful all the time, even every day? And if so, how might one go about expressing it, “paying it forward”?
Observant Jews start each day, even before getting out of bed, with a brief prayer of thanks to God for “returning my soul to me.” Said the late Jonathan Sacks, a highly distinguished British rabbi and member of the House of Lords, “We thank before we think.”
My nephew used to teach a class called “The Attitude of Gratitude” and encouraged his students to keep a journal to write down what they were grateful for. “The idea is to get everyone to commit to finding something new every day, so you train yourself to look with a positive eye,” he told me.
So what would we inscribe in our journal? Start with life itself: the wonder and magic of existence, whether on a grand or granular scale, Blake’s astonishing “World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.”
Laughter is life’s great salve. A 2016 article in the National Library of Medicine titled The Laughter Prescription: A Tool for Lifestyle Medicine reports that research “is beginning to show that laughter may also have serious positive physiological effects for those who engage in it on a regular basis. Providers who prescribe laughter to their patients in a structured way may be able to use these natural, free and easily distributable positive benefits.”
The article cites studies “that have linked laughter and humor with increased levels of pain tolerance,” cardiovascular benefits, increases in natural killer cell activity and “vasodilative effects lasting up to an hour after watching a comedic movie scene.”
Along the same lines, the author Norman Cousins wrote a best-selling book, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration, about how laughter helped save his life. Suffering from the effects of ankylosing spondylitis, a serious, painful and supposedly irreversible degenerative disorder, he self-prescribed Marx Brothers movies and TV comedies. “I made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”
The joy of music
Also in the top-things-about-being-alive sweepstakes, music ranks very high. “Without music, life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche famously said — or if not a mistake, then ceaseless drudgery, like driving south on I-65. From the five Bs (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, the Beatles and the Boss) to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, John Prine, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Yo Yo Ma, Midori and (fill in the blanks with your favorites), the great composers and performers make life thrilling and worthwhile.
Evanston resident Nina Kraus, who is a Northwestern professor of neurobiology and the author of Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, told me that research has shown that music training helps develop better listening and attention skills. “The hearing brain is vast, and music is the jackpot for the sound mind.”
In a review of a study her team developed, she concluded, “Musical training enhances language, reading ability, and listening skills.”
And in a July 2020 article she co-authored in American Scientist, Kraus reported that early music education develops “sharper hearing, augmented cognitive abilities, and heightened auditory brain functions.”
In his new book I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, neuroscientist Daniel Levitan writes, “Music promotes relaxation when we’re stressed; it can reduce blood pressure or make diabetes management easier; it soothes us when we’re depressed and energizes us for exercise. Patients with Parkinson’s use it to help them walk; patients with Alzheimer’s find that it reconnects them with themselves and improves memory. Music reduces pain, increases resilience and resolve, and can actually change our perception of time, such as when we’re lying in a sick bed with nothing else to do, going on a long road trip, or immersed in a VR game.”
The benefit of friends
Another of life’s great joys is friendship, particularly the old and deep bonds of affection we cherish from longtime companions, people who know us well, accept our faults and idiosyncrasies, share our joy in times of gladness and help sustain us in times of hardship. Friends bring connection, understanding, love and compassion.
Decades of research, as reported in a February article in Inc. Magazine, show that “people with strong social ties had a 50 percent better chance of survival, regardless of age, sex, health status, and cause of death, than those with weaker ties. In more direct terms, the health risk of having few friends is similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and more dangerous to your lifespan than being obese or not exercising.”
And notwithstanding Nick Lowe’s admonition, even kindness itself, a quality maligned by some as “soft” and even trivial, is worth adding to our gratitude list: to be grateful both for expressing kindness as well as receiving it. In his 2015 book Do the Kind Thing, candy magnate Daniel Lubetzky tells how his father survived the Holocaust due to the “courageous kindness” of strangers. Kindness has strong health and longevity benefits, and at the cosmic scale, kindness can bring a greater good to humankind in the physical and even spiritual sense, like the “butterfly effect” described in the Chinese proverb: “The flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world.” Even small acts of kindness have large reverberations.
You can make your own list of things to be grateful for: great books, movies and concerts; nature’s beauty, solace and spirituality; exercise and athletics; even rooting for local sports teams — though perhaps we Chicagoans don’t have much to be grateful for in that department right now.
I think we can all agree that acknowledging gratitude is important, even critical. The question is: what do we do with it?
The answer often suggested is to tell the people we love that we love them. At Thanksgiving, I sent out an email to a few of my most important friends expressing my thanks for being a part of their lives.
Volunteering our time
That’s well and good — but again, one and done. More substantively, we can reach out to help. Volunteering is perhaps the most profound as well as practical expression of gratitude.
There are numerous local not-for-profits and church groups that could benefit from our time and energy. VolunteerMatch lists dozens of volunteer opportunities around town, including pet therapy, tutoring, mentoring and even baking from home (Cake4Kids).
I checked out one that looked especially intriguing. “Volunteer with Open Heart Magic to experience the best, most rewarding way to help a child in the hospital and provide memories that will last a lifetime. Through fun, personal magic shows you will engage and empower young patients facing critical medical situations to help them laugh again.” They even teach volunteers the magic tricks!
Interfaith Action has volunteer opportunities listed on its website, including the producemobile, overnight shelter and hospitality center. Here’s the group’s soup kitchen schedule.
Connections’ connections
Volunteerism is central to the history and purpose of Evanston’s Connections for the Homeless. “Connections was founded by neighbors who volunteered to make a difference in the lives of people struggling with housing stability,” wrote Chief Executive Officer Betty Bogg in its recent volunteer newsletter. “Forty years later we are still the same organization that the community turns to when it wants to be part of the solution to ending homelessness. Our robust volunteer program has opportunities for everyone, from lunch making that can be done at home with young children to recurring support positions in our health clinics and drop in programs. We have one-time and recurring opportunities, weekend and weekday opportunities. We can work with individuals, families, community and faith groups. In short, we have a place for everyone who wants to help.”
Volunteer information and sign-up opportunities can be found at Connections’ website. People interested in volunteering can write volunteer@connect2home.org.
Since 2002, Beth Emet Synagogue at 1224 Dempster St. has run a soup kitchen with volunteer help. Interested parties can email soupkitchen@bethemet.org to inquire about procedures and available dates. At present, volunteers are booked as far ahead as February.
A seat at the city’s table
The city can use your help, too: “Evanston’s Boards, Committees, and Commissions are an opportunity for residents to get directly involved in the City’s decision-making process,” Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss wrote me. “They’re a way to get a seat at the table and begin to steer our community in a new direction. I would enthusiastically encourage anyone with an interest in civic affairs to consider applying.”
Those interested can go here to learn more about committee and other city volunteer opportunities. Call 311 or click here to apply.
Gratitude for our blessings is the flip side of anger over our suffering, which we also need to acknowledge. “[We are] living in God’s realm, where joy never spares us from sorrow,” wrote Abraham Verghese in his magnificent novel The Covenant of Water. Volunteering gives us the opportunity to balance the pleasure/pain account, and “pay forward” our blessings to help people in need as well as our “beloved community,” as Martin Luther King called it.
But it also has huge psychosocial benefits personally. I mentored a young Evanston man for 10 years, from the time he was in grade school until well after he graduated from Evanston Township High School. We’re still in touch. Hopefully he got a lot out of it; for sure I did: I’m forever grateful for our friendship.