Each new year, I choose a word that will serve as my theme for the year—something that I want to work with, explore, cultivate, both personally and professionally. My word for 2022 was “Gratitude,” and I learned a lot about how to feel more grateful. This year, I want to explore a rather different kind of word.

My word for 2023 is (drumroll please…)

I’ve read or listened to 44 books so far in 2022! Here’s a little drawing I made where I’ve been keeping track of this year’s reading list. (A few blank ones at the end, in case I finish any more.)

Here my top five; these are the ones that have stayed with me, that I draw upon again and again:

My year of Gratitude is coming to a close. I started this year recoiling from the word “gratitude.” It made me feel selfish, ashamed, and annoyed. It felt like the people who focused on it were holier-than-thou, naïve, or, at best, insincere. But I chose the word because I felt like if I didn’t learn to become more grateful, I’d continue feeling empty and unworthy, no matter how much success I achieved or things I got.

I was starting to get worried that the end of the year was approaching, and I hadn’t shifted all that much on this year’s theme of “Gratitude.” Thanksgiving would fall flat again this year. Sure, I’d thought about gratitude as a concept a lot, felt little glimmers here and there, but ultimately, I still felt like my life was full of unending to-do lists and piles of laundry.

One thing I’ve been wrestling with in working with my theme of Gratitude this year is what you might call the “Pollyanna factor”: gratitude is a syrupy sweet, simple-minded or even damaging version of toxic positivity. “Just smile and look on the bright side,” (she says through gritted teeth).

But, of course, the world has many ills that need real attention. People are suffering, and it feels like the engaged and empathic thing to do is to suffer greatly along with them, not list our blessings.

In the month before my 40th birthday, I ran a little experiment to see if a daily gratitude practice would help me get out of a funk. Maybe it was the 2-Year Pandemic blues, but this past March, a heaviness settled on me and lingered there. With the weight of war, mass shootings, Supreme Court rulings, and record high heat, I felt lonely and depressed.

You never know how close you are to something terrible happening. That was the feeling my client struggled with for a long time after enduring life-threatening experiences in her childhood. And, while she’d worked through a lot of her anger and anxiety, she was still struggling with accessing joy.

Spring has come to Portland, (despite yesterday’s weird spring snow). As the blooming flowers and warm weather returns, I can’t help but feel a twinge of fear at the coming summer. What used to be anticipation of sprinklers, popsicles, and backyard barbecues is now bracing for wildfire smoke, heat domes, and gunshots ringing through the city nights.

Some days, it seems absurd to continue to turn toward my 2022 theme of gratitude.

Spring has come to Portland, (despite yesterday’s weird spring snow). As the blooming flowers and warm weather returns, I can’t help but feel a twinge of fear at the coming summer. What used to be anticipation of sprinklers, popsicles, and backyard barbecues is now bracing for wildfire smoke, heat domes, and gunshots ringing through the city nights.

Some days, it seems absurd to continue to turn toward my 2022 theme of gratitude.

As I’ve continued to turn towards Gratitude this year, (my chosen theme for 2022), I’ve noticed a clue as to why gratitude is so difficult for so many of us.

The word “gratitude” comes from the Latin gratus which means “thankful” or “pleasing.” While the first part of this definition feels obvious, the “pleasing” part strikes me as being a big part of the challenge of gratitude.

If you feel like everything is a struggle, wu wei is a Taoist concept for you. It means “doing without doing” or “effortless effort.” Wu wei describes the way a sailboat crosses a lake, patiently using the natural energy of the wind, gliding silently through the water.

This subtle harnessing of what exists requires a different kind of effort than the strained, painful hustling many of us are used to. I often feel more akin to a motorboat barreling loudly through the surface of a lake, churning up seaweed and spewing gas, just trying to get somewhere else more quickly.

I chose “Gratitude” as my word for 2022, but, the truth is that I kind of hate the word. When I hear it, I feel a tightening, an inner eye roll that pushes against the Evangelical, Chicken Soup for the Soul sappiness of my youth. Deeper inside, I hear an echo saying “you’re so ungrateful,” followed by a shameful sense that I’m a selfish, privileged, spoiled brat.

Nevertheless, I chose the word “gratitude” as my theme for this year because I want to work with these feelings and make a shift. I’ve been incredibly fortunate in these last few pandemic years, and let’s be honest, for my entire life. But the white supremacist, capitalist addiction to achieve and have more, bigger, better has me focused on what I am lacking, rather than what I have.

In 2021, I finally did an exercise that I’ve asking my clients to do for years, and the outcome surprised me. The exercise is to choose your top two core values from this list from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead. As I tell my clients, there are plenty of great, important values here, but the task is choose the two that can act as touchstones, anchors, that you can return to again and again to guide your decisions and actions.

I always knew I valued wisdom—after all, “philosopher” means “lover of wisdom”—and, as I thought about all the values that were important to me, I realized that my definition of wisdom had broadened to include not only thoughtfulness, reflection, and critical thinking, but also the wisdom of the body, of the natural world, of the ineffable understanding of lived experience, and all the love, pain, beauty, grief, and compassion there. But the real surprise was the second value I settled on.

Early in the pandemic, my then four-year-old daughter and I were out for a walk and happened upon a neighboring house where a massive tree was being cut into pieces and thrown into a wood chipper. She wanted to watch the display, so she sat down in my lap on the sidewalk at the opposite corner of the street. Moments later, an exasperated-looking, middle-aged, white guy on a cell phone, standing next to a BMW, hung up his call and casually wandered over to us, lamenting to me how much the tree removal was costing him. Towering over my daughter and me, he moved closer and closer toward us, seemingly oblivious of our six-foot pandemic bubble of safety, little droplets of invisible spit flying from his unmasked lips. Nodding politely to his rant, I tried, in my cross-legged seat, to inconspicuously inch my daughter and me away from him, silently hoping that he would not step any closer.

My five-year-old daughter loves spooky Halloween house decor. Last week, we stood for twenty minutes in the drizzling rain, in front of a neighbor's yard, while she delightfully pointed out grinning skeletons, an eight-foot tall, rubber-faced ghoul, and over a dozen bloody-eyed baby dolls hanging from a tree.

Trying to imagine this practice from her fresh eyes, it struck me as curious that our culture has collectively decided to take a month to celebrate death, decay, and all things dreadful.

Most of us, most of the time, organize our lives so that we will not have to encounter the scary realities of the world. We close ourselves off and try to push away the frightful, anxiety-producing, specters that keep us up at night.

“Who’s holding the container?!” I moaned, my face in my hands. I sat on the living room carpet of a rented beach house, in a circle of half a dozen friends, trying to figure out if I could let myself go. I’d invited them all there for a “grief weekend,” a sort of ridiculous idea I had for a birthday celebration. I wanted to go scream at the ocean, gnash teeth, wail, dance, cry, and release the heaviness that we’d all be carrying after more than a year of quarantine.

On our first night at the beach house, I’d told my friends that I would try to create and hold the safe space “container” of the weekend—where they could feel safe to grieve, share, and be vulnerable—while also simultaneously climbing into the container with them to do my own sharing. “So I may need your help holding the container sometimes,” I said.

One friend chuckled and said she had this image of all of us linking hands in a whirlpool, one person gripping on to the solid edge and the rest, hanging tight, shouting “Who’s holding the container?!”

“I heard an interview with Oprah and that neuroscientist she just wrote a book with, who said that the biggest impact on an infant brain is in the first two months of life,” one of my clients, a mother of two young children, said to me last month. “And all I could think for days was: the first two months of life, the first two months of life,” she continued, frantically. “I felt like a ghost their first two months of life. What was I even doing? I barely remember it, I was so sleep deprived!”

More and more research is emerging to confirm the impact of early childhood, pre-natal, and even pre-generational experiences on the developing human brain, (after all, the egg that created a granddaughter was present inside the womb of her fetus mother and pregnant grandmother). Stressful, traumatic, or positive experiences in utero and early infancy become part of the child’s neurology, shaping the way that child sees the world and themselves for years into the future.

At a virtual meditation retreat I attended earlier this year, I had a moment of profound insight, or what the Buddhists call prajña. I sat alone in a rented room, trying to focus on my breathing. I found myself thinking about some minor family conflict and felt the tightening in my chest. I tried to get curious. It felt like a small, spindly ball of ice, as if my heart itself had been frozen over. Suddenly a word popped into my mind: Shame. This was the feeling of shame.

Here is the series of thoughts that followed:

Wow, that’s cool. I can identify this feeling. Huh, I should write an essay about this. Yeah—

An essay? God, you always need to show how smart you are, to turn every wound into wisdom, don’t you? You’re always trying to get control! Can’t you just sit here and feel this instead of trying to escape with thoughts of your own superiority? What’s wrong with you?

Oh, my god, look at that critical mind! Why do you always need to beat up on yourself? You’re such a perfectionist! You’re so afraid to just be human! This is why people don’t like you, ya know.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about grief; well, that’s not quite honest—I’ve also been feeling a lot of grief. I wouldn’t have even called it grief until just recently; I might’ve called it numbness, anger, inexplicable sorrow. Ya know, just down, without even knowing why.

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller says that one of the “gates” of grief is around “what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred.”

I am a recovering self-help junkie.

I have consumed an embarrassing number of self-help books, podcasts, seminars, courses, and retreats, not to mention the hours of therapy, coaching, journaling, meditating, and all manner of efforts toward self-realization. For years, I have treated myself as perpetual self-improvement project, always trying to level up: get up earlier, exercise more, cut out sugar, become a better mother, make more money, consume less, create more, strive until I fall over.

This past January, however, I heard a teaching that has radically shifted the way I think about what it means to be the best version of myself.