By Zeng Hanyi
1 April 2012
What can it mean to be genuine in our gratitude and interactions then?
(This is a continuation of the previous post, “Growing in Thankfulness”.)
Project:Gratitude seeks to encourage a genuine sense of gratitude to the support staff on campus. It starts with an appreciation of the real and immediate part they play in making this campus a comfortable place for us. We need only reflect on this in our own personal time and space to see the truth of this. Yet just stopping there will just leave the persons of our appreciation, and thankfulness, a faceless mass. It seems to me that there is something inimical to the concept of gratitude if it stays simply at the level of an intellectual appreciation.
At its core, perhaps gratitude is an exercise in appreciation, and an exercise in reciprocity. Without appreciation, gratitude becomes hollow, even patronizing. Without reciprocity as an expression of gratitude, gratitude stays inchoate, distant and irrelevant, a pleasing intellectual exercise. Further, any proper appreciation must not only be of what is being done, but also of the person behind the act. Otherwise we only come to see things mechanistically, where people are defined by their utility. In this sense, gratitude is inherently relational.
Therefore, it seems genuine gratitude can only start with a true appreciation, flowing naturally into an expression in reciprocity. If that is true however, then it can only be right and genuine that I go down to express my thanks to the support staff, having acknowledged and being appreciative of what they are doing on campus. There need not be anything inherently artificial or contradictory about expressing gratitude by participating in a project. What then of these feelings of artificiality?
Perhaps the key is to disentangle, to some extent, what we should be doing, from how we feel going about it. To be genuine about engagement is not always to feel entirely comfortable and natural about it. I found that my discomfort was not due to a lack of genuine appreciation of the support staff, or of wrong motivations behind this expression in reciprocity, but simply because I was being pushed out of my comfort zone. In this case, genuine gratitude starts not from a warm fuzzy feeling of thankfulness or an intuitive feeling that this is natural (though there’s nothing to say you cannot start this way!) - but from a determination of the will, based on what we should be doing.
Nevertheless, the beauty of the concept of gratitude, in its components of appreciation and reciprocity, is that things do not stop there. Perhaps you would have already drawn the link with the anecdote of our experience at UCC – and realized that reciprocity leads us back into a deeper appreciation, folding back on itself in a virtuous cycle. An initial appreciation compels us into relating in reciprocity, which can reveals to us still more of what there is to be appreciated, and the cycle repeats itself.
It is this cycle of appreciation and reciprocity that underpins Project:Gratitude, we hope. This blog itself is a demonstration of that initial appreciation of the support staff, an open invitation to everyone to participate in this cycle of gratitude. Our exhibition, Splash Some Colour!, too is an invitation to the public to investigate gratitude, by beginning with an appreciation of these support staff. It is based on these themes of appreciation and reciprocity as well.
Although Splash Some Colour! has ended its month-long run, we hope that Project:Gratitude will remain in our hearts. Penny for your thoughts? :)
