The Guest House by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Naturally, we are grateful to the people and experiences of our lives that have been beneficial to us—that have helped us to become who we are. The teacher who gave us confidence in ourselves. The friend who always has our back. The career that supports us and our families. It is a challenge, however, to feel equal gratitude to the people who have been unkind or unsupportive, the teachers who were unsatisfied with our efforts, the school we didn’t get into or the job we didn’t get. Nevertheless, it is important that we adopt a feeling of thankfulness for our disappointments, too.
Most of us don’t know anything about our spiritual life before our birth, let alone our previous earth lives, yet as we study karma and reincarnation, we understand that we have consequences in this life for what we did before. In our current lives, we meet people with whom we have karma, and we are set in circumstances with them to have the experiences we need. We eagerly approached this life to work out our karma; it is a fact of life. Gratitude for all things is a practice that can help to free us from past resentment and disappointment and lead us to look more openly at the things that aren’t “going our way” as well as acknowledge all positive gifts we have received.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
If we often look back over our life, we can say to ourselves something highly significant for the present moment. We can say: we owe the facility with which we adapt our soul, perhaps even our physical constitution with more or less dexterity to life, to the circumstances that in youth we were able to live happily, not suffering from depression, that we were led to much that gave us joy.
These impressions of joy in the soul endow us in later life with a certain happiness, although it is drawn down into deeper regions of our being. Let us now ask how much of what life brings us in the way of inner deepening, how much of this is to be attributed to our sorrows, our sufferings? And let us also ask: what can arise in the soul if we look at our life with these questions in mind? We must give the answer to these questions not with the intellect, but with feeling. And feeling answers: I must be thankful to all that has come into my life because only thereby have I become the being I am and with whom I more or less identify myself. I cannot know whether otherwise I might have been of even less account. I can only be thankful to life, because I have become what I am through its joys and sorrows.
These questions must be answered with a feeling of thankfulness to life. And it means a great deal if this thankfulness for earthly existence finds its way into the human soul. If certain deepenings of the soul are achieved and life is judged not out of emotion but out of the soul in its purity, then this thankfulness always arises. Though much of what life has brought us may be deplored, yet in many respects the regret is the expression of a complete error. For if what is regretted had not taken place, we should not be what we actually are. The feeling that we can have about life amounts ultimately to this thankfulness.
Thankfulness may also be felt even when we are not entirely in agreement with life, when we would like to have had more from our existence… It can truly be said that whatever, in our opinion, life has denied us—and this opinion may after all be erroneous—it has at all events brought us something. For what it has brought us we must develop the feeling of thankfulness. But when in all earnestness we develop the feeling of thankfulness—we need only reflect on this, and it will be readily understood—there must be thankfulness for something else. Anyone who has developed thankfulness to life will be led, through this thankfulness itself, to recognition of the invisible spiritual Bestowers of life and to the transformation of memory in loving devotion to them.
The most beautiful way for one’s personality to be led to the supersensible is when the path leads through thankfulness to life. Thankfulness is also a way into the supersensible and finally it becomes veneration and love for the life-bestowing spirit of humankind. Thankfulness gives birth to love and when love is born from thankfulness to life it opens the heart to the spiritual Powers permeating all existence.
Excerpt from: Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Volume VII, Lecture Seven by Rudolf Steiner. June 13, 1924, Breslau, Germany.
This spirit of thankfulness is a blessing to ourselves and to others. The more we practice it, the more we are able to recognize setbacks as opportunities and appreciate them for the gifts they are.
This spirit of thankfulness leads us to love and acceptance of ourselves and of others. It leads us to recognize the guidance coming to us from the spiritual worlds. It leads us to acknowledge who we have become thus far and directs us to feel hope towards all that will come to us from the future.
A little later in the above lecture Dr. Steiner says, “Whatever life has been, when we take it in its reality and not sentimentally, we can certainly develop this thankfulness and acknowledge that we have been forged by the destiny that goes with us or against us…”