This week I was forced to have a conversation I didn’t want to have.

Each year, my organization holds an All Staff retreat where 700 employees from around the world descend upon the Chesapeake Bay for a week full of keynotes, brainstorming, and socializing. It’s usually fun, although exhausting. This week, the second plenary session was led by a climate-marine scientist who was intent on helping us confront our trauma from working on the front lines of climate change.

Her method was to identify – for us – that what we do every day is tough (my environmental organization works across the globe to find market-based solutions to the gravest environmental and public health threats of our time). According to her, it’s emotional, heartbreaking, scary, uncertain, and just plain difficult. She told us that it’s okay to be upset – she gets upset too. She even cried a couple times onstage recounting her experience hearing about a family that died in the wildfires in California last year.

My reaction to this was, frankly, “what the f?” I felt angry. Who was this person to tell me how I should feel? Why was she crying? I felt put-upon, as if I should feel like crying about this work is helpful. I also felt voyeuristic – thankfully, I personally have not felt the effects of climate change the way that family in California has, so who am I to cry about it?

We then had to sit in groups comprised of colleagues, whom we likely had never met, and  workshop it: talk about our feelings and how we cope with the difficulty of the space we occupy. While I was incredibly resistant to all of this and was intent to sit there with my mouth shut, I reminded myself that when I’m made uncomfortable and vulnerable, those are the very moments to sit up, buck up, and pay attention.

So I did.

My group helped each other through the awkwardness. We identified the privilege of our work and the vulnerability of many of the groups around the world we represent and advocate with and for.  We all agreed that we compartmentalize our feelings of sadness and fear in order to do our jobs every day – if we all cried every time a climate report came out identifying our doom, or when Trump undermines foundational laws that protect us from dirty air, we’d never be effective.

We identified the gratitude we feel for each other and the effort we impart every day to mitigate climate change and make it little less tragic.

I want to lean in here, to the idea of gratitude (which I intend to write about in subsequent posts).

First, I will say what I don’t think gratitude is: it is not, simply, being appreciative of what others do for you, or being thankful for some gift that is bestowed upon you, as identified by many of the definitions here. It’s not fleeting or superficial.

Gratitude, Cicero said, “is not only the greatest one but also the mother of all the other remaining virtues.” To me, gratitude is a state of being content and feeling safe that can be cultivated through conscious acknowledgement of the effort and authenticity of others, and of the self, to do good by and for one another and oneself. Simply put, it’s about feeling fulfilled (good) because of the good effects of others’ (and oneself’s) behavior and effort.

If we can feel gratitude, and be grateful, so much becomes possible:

• We can approach those we know and those we don’t with an expectation of good faith;
• We can identify the silver linings when all seems lost;
• We can accept that some things are simply out of our control;
• We can focus on what we have, not what we lack;
• And so, so much more.

I am grateful for the discomfort that this plenary speaker threw me and 699 of my colleagues into. While I may still disagree with some of her methods and examples, I find value in her intent: she opened the door to a collective conversation about the importance of recognizing one’s place in a system and allowing space for the feelings that arise from that place. Once we identify for ourselves, not for each other, how we feel and how we use those feelings as fuel to achieve a greater good, we can move forward together to achieve our collective mission.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash