The Bravest Thing You Can Do Is To Accept With Gratitude the World As It Is

Colbert

Just days after Stephen Colbert criticized CBS for paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit with Donald Trump, Colbert’s show on CBS was canceled. Many, including lawmakers, question if the cancelation was politically motivated. Colbert had called the lawsuit what it was: “a big, fat bribe”. And then he was gone. Vanished in the same week that funding for PBS and NPR was cut.

People, this is right from the fascists’ playbook. SO MUCH right now is coming right from the fascist guide to taking over a democracy. Why are people not storming the streets? I was so disheartened to have attended the nationwide Make Good Trouble demonstration yesterday only to see a bare minimum crowd. What happened to the 1,000 plus who showed up in my small town for No Kings Day? What? Are we getting normalized to the cruelty, to the defunding of those institutions and programs that serve all the people? Are people overwhelmed? Are they saying it’s not going to happen. It is happening right now.

But let’s go back to Stephen for a minute. Maybe you are not a fan. He is one of the few things I catch on TV these days. I always appreciate his monologue; I often appreciate his guests. Sure, he has guests that I’ve never heard of before so, yeah, fast forward, but Stephen is a smart and compassionate man. That brings me to this piece that I first posted in May of 2024. Take a moment to reflect on what he has to say about love and grief.

********

Here is the gist of it:

Stephen Colbert: “The bravest thing you can do is accept with gratitude the world as it is.”

Anderson Cooper: You told an interviewer that you have learned to, in your words, “love the thing that I most wish had not happened”. You went on to say, “What punishments of God are not gifts?” Do you really believe that?

Stephen Colbert: Yes. It's a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that…..I didn’t learn that I was grateful for the thing that I most wish had not happened, so much as I realized it. But if you are grateful for your life ….then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for. But, what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss which allows you to connect with that other person, which then allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it is like to be a human being… And so at a young age, I suffered something and by the time I was in serious relationships in my life, with friends or with my wife or with my children, I had some understanding that everybody is suffering. However imperfectly, I can acknowledge their suffering and connect with them and love them in a deep way. That makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered so that you can know that about other people….It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here and being human, if you can’t make the most of your humanity? I want to be the most human I can be, and that involves acknowledging and ultimately being grateful for the things that I wish hadn’t happened because they gave me a gift.”

Just watch the interview. You may not be a fan of Stephen Colbert but he is a reflective man who was handed tragedy at a very young age. He is a practicing Catholic yet smart enough not to be a sheep. He’s clearly thought through some of the Big Questions and he is articulate enough to convey his beliefs.

What changed for me after I recently heard this clip, was that I started thinking of the good days and the bad days of life. I will only get so many hours, so many days, weeks, before this life ends. I want to notice the enjoyable days and the hard days. I want to take the hard days and turn them into reminders that everyone suffers. Maybe my hard day can be used in some way to connect to others, to connect to humanity. Maybe I can accept, with gratitude, the world as it is. The days, good or bad, ARE a gift. People who have suffered unfathomable losses know that. My losses and hard days have been of the most common kind. But I am getting older and maybe I can see now what I couldn’t see with younger eyes. My eyes have not been impacted by grievous loss. But they are open and they want to see the Beauty in the world, in every day.

IDK . Life.

The shorter clip of this interview: Stephen Colbert on grief

The full interview: The full interview