Tragedy and Peace

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Our mind of love may be buried deep under many layers of forgetfulness and suffering. – Thich Nhat Hanh

After several years of studying gratitude, and intentionally trying to be more grateful, I have come to understand gratitude as a path to peace. I have talked with more than 30 people, from the far corners of life, about gratitude. I have transcribed our conversations and tried to make sense of it all. One of the things that comes up again and again is the notion that deep and abiding gratitude is present in both pain and joy. Gratitude is born from the acknowledgement that we are the sum of all experiences – the “good” and the “bad.” To love ourselves and others, to know true peace, we must run toward and hold gratitude as gently and fiercely as we can.

What does it mean to hold gratitude?

Holding gratitude looks like seeing gifts in everyday.

In our day-to-day lives, it can be easy to be distracted and frazzled. It can be easy to be a fuse ready to detonate rather than candle burning brightly. Gratitude is more candle than fuse. Gratitude illuminates our everyday in ways that make spiraling downward, staying in dark spaces, and building walls around our heart impossible.

Holding gratitude looks like embracing it all.

Embracing it all means we see the beauty in the ordinary, sunshine through clouds, and wonder in frogs and bees and worms. All of it includes the distracted driver who blocks traffic, the rejection letter for the job to which you applied, the insurance company who does not accept your claim. Being grateful for obviously amazing things is not hard. (Though it is often easy to take those things for granted.) Being grateful for tough things is truly what holding gratitude looks like.

Holding gratitude looks like thank you, again, and again, and again.

We can never express gratitude enough. Expressing gratitude is a key aspect of being present and awake. Expressing gratitude can look like gratitude lists, thank you notes, gifts, or even favors. The more we do those things the better at grateful living we become. We have gratitude muscles that get strengthened when we act. We can find peace in tragedy in the light of gratitude.