One morning this past weekend, I started the day out in the collard patch.
This is not any ordinary collard patch. This is a crooked row of plants that somehow has managed to line a drainage ditch in the backyard.
I didn’t plant them there, at least not deliberately. The closest I come to actually planting anything edible is when I dump fruit and vegetable stems and scraps on a makeshift compost pile a few yards from the new collard patch.
I picked about a dozen of the lower leaves from the biggest plants, just like somebody who had actually worked to plant the things there, and took them inside to rinse the sand off.
And somewhere in the middle of rinsing and tossing those few leaves into a drainer, I felt a sudden happiness.
Not a gradually growing sense of contentment that creeps up on you, but an intense rush of joy.
It got my attention. It felt a lot like gratitude.
It’s not that there’s any lack of greens in the house at the moment. The freezer is currently packed full of them, evidence of a holiday cooking spree.
It had more to do with the idea of these beautiful edible plants cropping up in my yard like a gift.
It only lasted a few seconds, but the memory of some emotions can be as good as holding on to them.
The experience reminded me of a memory my grandmother once told me about her childhood in New York’s Allegheny Mountains.
Sometimes while wandering around that beautiful countryside, she would come upon a patch of berries, and she would stop and help herself to them.
It would occur to her, she said, that someone knew when she would be passing that way, and had made sure that this gift would be ripe just in time for her to enjoy it.
As much as I liked that story, I always looked at it with a healthy dose of skepticism. I imagined all the times she might have taken a walk and not found any delicious surprises, or all the berries that might have ripened without anyone having found them.
That kind of skepticism is good for us. It protects us from a lot of deceit, self inflicted and otherwise.
But skepticism is a conscious process, part of what psychologists sometimes refer to as the “high road” of thinking which involves the parts of our brain that have to do with reason and logic.
That flash of joy at the kitchen sink, and my grandmother’s thankfulness for the berries on her path, are less likely to be products of that “high road” of thinking. Other parts of the brain are more involved with emotions and memories and other aspects of thinking that are not so conscious or analytical.
Psychologists sometimes call it the “low road” of thinking. Not that it’s lower in the sense of being inferior, but because it’s hidden, not something we’re so consciously aware of. In other words, it tends to “lay low” until it emerges with some sort of insight or emotional response.
Like a rush of gratitude for berries on the path, or for a dozen small collard leaves in the sink.
Sometimes, on the car radio or in social media, I come across the idea that we should develop “an attitude of gratitude.”
Personally, I am wary of any advice that rhymes. And even though it likely would do most of us some good to work on being more grateful, that’s not what was going on at the kitchen sink.
Developing an attitude is a conscious, “high road” kind of mental activity. But that morning, while I washed the sand off baby collard leaves, no developing was needed.
The joy was unplanned, not the result of any rhyming directive. Straight off the “low road.”
Sometimes it’s enough to make a skeptic step back and regroup.
Julia Cochran is a licensed professional counselor in Rincon. She can be reached at 912-772-3072 or by email at JCochranPhD@GileadCounseling.com.