The week she turned 33, Kristi Nelson was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer that had metastasized to her spine. She spent the next 18 months in treatment, much of it aggressive, with grueling side effects.
When she was finally released from hospitals and treatment, she made a life-changing discovery: everything around her was more “breathtakingly wondrous” than she could have imagined.
“Having a body felt like a miracle. The appreciation I felt for people was epic. I felt grateful for most everything every day…especially the gift of time and waking up to another day,” she observed.
Over the three decades since then, she has made it her practice to live gratefully, which she describes as taking nothing for granted, especially in hard times.
I was fortunate to come to know Kristi around the writing of her book, Wake Up Grateful, and I have learned deeply from her work as an activist and former executive director of the global nonprofit, Grateful Living.
One thing I especially appreciate is that Kristi is not about “gratefulness lite.” Not by a long shot.
“Waking up grateful is not easy for me, and I’ve never had a harder time than in this past year,” she says. “This is a really challenging time for anybody who has a heart.”
It’s About Strengthening Our Staying Power
Like savoring, gratefulness cultivates what is good and, in the process, strengthens our capacity to navigate through difficulty.
In my work, this appears increasingly urgent, so mission-driven people can continue to stand for the health and well-being of people and the planet, despite the obstacles we face.
But I didn’t start out this way.
Over many years as a leader in mission-driven organizations, I believed I was among the many people trying, in one way or another, to “save the world.”
I soon discovered, however, that a “save-the-world” perspective and the burden it puts on our shoulders often lead to overwhelm, depletion, and burnout—dynamics that are increasingly common, and undermine much-needed capacity.
Eventually, I discovered a more promising route: a growing body of research about the benefits of savoring. This deliberate effort to focus as much on the good in life as the news would have us focus on the bad helps to:
Replenish us,
Attract others to our mission, and
Grow interest and capacity for engaging in social good.
Living gratefully, as Kristi shared in our recent conversation, is an important part of all of that.
Six Insights for People Who Want to Keep Moving Forward
Six highlights of our conversation, slightly edited for clarity and brevity, are below, along with some suggestions for a practice you might try.
You can watch (or listen) to the conversation on YouTube.
And please consider sharing this post. It’s a conversation worth having.
1. Mission-driven work is about love. Don’t lose touch with that.
“Those of us who have long been in the nonprofit sector, working on trying to make the world a more hospitable, equitable, beautiful place to live, are doing it because we love the world, other people, and our communities,” said Kristi.
“So, to me, the big thing is not losing touch with the love that’s the source for all of us, of the work that we do,” she added. It’s important to ask: What are the things that nourish us, and how do we stay connected to them?”
2. Neither grateful living nor savoring is about putting your head in the sand.
Kristi starts each day not with a gratitude list but with the news. Then she meditates.
“I put my attention on the news and know what’s happening in the world around me, so that I can make sense of being a human being in this time,” she said. “I have to be able to sit with what’s true.
“Then I light a candle. And I sit, I meditate, I write.”
3. None of this is easy—for anyone.
“Last month, there were a few days that I could hardly function,” Kristi said. “I was crying all the time.”
She wrote about it because, as she observed, “it’s really important for us to know those things about each other: the face that you see, that it’s all composed and put together, is not the face that’s always true.”
4. Beware of internalizing cruelty.
Reflecting on the three days when she had trouble functioning, Kristi said that she realized she had lost trust in herself.
“Right now, it feels like there’s so much distrust and so much not to trust around me. And I internalized that somehow. I was beating myself up for having a hard time. I was giving up on myself.”
That’s when she realized: If we become cruel to ourselves and to each other, cruelty wins.
5. Cultivating joy does not betray your concerns for the world.
There were times, Kristi said, when she felt she owed the world her despair as opposed to her joy. But she has come to realize it’s a both-and proposition.
“When I fill my eyes with wonder and my heart with love or joy, I do not betray my concerns for the world. I nourish my capacity to attend to them,” she said, sharing from a piece she recently wrote.
“You know, everything is about savoring for me,” Kristi added. “I never know when it will be my last meal or my last interaction with someone I love. So, I don’t take those things for granted, and I haven’t for over 32 years.”
6. Loss is a wake-up call to what’s worth savoring and saving.
Case in point: Colorado Poet Laureate and activist Andrea Gibson, who died last summer after being diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer.
“They went from being an angry activist to an activist who focused on what was beautiful about the world and what was worth saving,” said Kristi. “Their poetry started to focus on these miraculous kinds of truths that we so take for granted about the extraordinariness of the natural world and how much we have to learn from it.”
“It became about how to live and love and love the world into saving.”
Finally, Kristi said, “I do believe that the activism that really is most effective is an embodiment of what it is that we love and is an expression of what we love. And the opportunity of this moment, perhaps, is to really be in touch with how much we each love the world and other people and what we are committed to protecting.”
A 5-minute practice:
The next time you get triggered by a disturbing headline, consider trying this:
Take a few deep breaths, and rate, on a scale of 1-10, how capable you feel about contributing your gifts and goodness to the world.
Write down 5 things that you are truly grateful for, want to savor, and to protect for future generations.
Reflect again on how capable you feel and rate it. Is it more or less than before? Notice the ways in which your motivation might have shifted, and focus on this.
As Kristi says, “Unless we have an honest inventory of the things that are resources and assets in our lives—the things that we love and treasure, the things that we savor— we’re doing a disservice to the world. Only once we know what we have available to us can we do something with it.”
And so, as I like to say, we save what we savor.
Lisa Bennett, author of the forthcoming book Savor the World, offers a “Savor the World” keynote, an invitation to flip the script on despairing times. She is also the creator and facilitator of the Staying Power workshop series, which helps leaders and teams strengthen the clarity, grounding, and agency needed to keep advancing critical missions amid growing obstacles.
Beautiful. Just what I needed to do this work in my little part of the world. Blessings to you both ❤️❤️