Grating With Gratitude

Yesterday I pointed out that the word grateful contains within it the word grate, which, as a noun, means the metal lattice at the bottom of the fireplace. But, as a verb, to grate means to reduce (something, especially food) to small shreds by rubbing it on a grater. How can gratitude be compared to something like grating cheese or nutmeg? Sometimes in life we are presented with something that is too wonderful or too terrible for us to fully comprehend, something that is just too big for our hearts and minds to receive. When we hold our child in our arms for the first time, we cannot swallow all of the joy that is coming to us. And then again, when we bury our child, we cannot swallow all of the grief. The first time we hear the word cancer, not from a newspaper but after a routine medical exam, it is too big to fit into our brains. When we are hit by a hurricane and after hours of searching we find our family alive and not too battered, the relief overwhelms us. If we were to compare our lives to making an Alfredo sauce, then experiences like these would be like trying to drop a whole block of Parmesan cheese into the pan. We can stir all we want, but it's just going to sit there. However, if we first grate the Parmesan into tiny little strips, then we can incorporate and absorb them into the sauce. This is what gratitude does for us. Gratitude helps us to grate down those experiences that are far, far too large for us to swallow and absorb and comprehend and appreciate on any meaningful level. That first moment of holding our child in our arms is too big, too intense for our souls to hold onto, but every time we take a moment to watch the light dance in their smiling eyes, or marvel at the surprising strength in their tiny little grips, we grate off a tiny sliver of that first enormous block of joy that our hearts and our minds can savor and absorb. In the moment that we watch that casket lower into the ground, our grief is much too vast for us to even believe that we will ever be grateful about anything ever again. But in the weeks and months and years that follow, every time we hear the faintest echo of their laughter, or drive by their favorite park, we grate off a little sliver of that great block of grief mingled with love that our hearts and minds can savor and absorb. Some joys and some sorrows are so big that it will take a lifetime of gratitude, a lifetime of stopping to smell the roses, of holding hands or shedding tears, of scraping off just one more little sliver that we can fully comprehend and appreciate and absorb. Gratitude isn't about appreciating the little things, not really. It's about grating off little pieces of the big things and appreciating those little pieces, since we don't yet have room for the big things.