Gratitude

I'm told gratitude is very important for the health of the mind, that daily gratitude makes life good and great and even wonderful, exceptional, brilliant. Gratitude looks you in your face and tells you all about the things you have so it's impossible to look at life in a half empty sort of way, but rather a half full sort of way. Gratitude says you don't have to have everything, but that everything you have is enough, more than enough for you to be content. One thing that interesting is that thankfulness kind of forces your brain to see positive things even if you had a terrible day or something awful happened. Even in those not-so-great moments there's something positive to reap. This is especially helpful for those of us who kind of live in a world of not-so-great even if there aren't any specific moments in the day that equal not-so-great in the conventional sense of a legit bad thing happening. For those of us who live in the not-so-great most of the time, the positive moments aren't necessarily positive. They are there and are factually positive things. For example, getting ice cream, taking the dog for a walk, swimming in the ocean, hiking, spending time with friends, are all positive things. The problem is that the not-so-great world pulls us into a funk, you could say, that doesn't let us feel joy or happiness, contentedness or peace. It drags us constantly through the mud and even when we have ice cream in our hands we are being dragged through the mud and mud is getting in our ice cream and ruining our positive moment that we were supposed to have with our ice cream. It's like having blinders that accept the negative circumstances, the heavy blows, and the neutral or bad things that happen to us, but the positive things—we can't see through the blinders; the blinders are sealed shut.

But I want to stop here and say this doesn't make people less aware of how much they have. I am all too aware of how blessed I am and how many wonderful people and things I have in my life. There is always something to be thankful for and it makes me sad that I can't fully appreciate the blessings I have. It sometimes makes me feel awful that I have so much and that I am not happy. And I think that it is an example of what we have always been told, that happiness has never and will never come from the physical things that we have. The happiness comes from how we perceive our lives. Our brain tells us how happy we are. Gratitude is good and great and wonderful, but if our brains are in a deep funk, the wonderful things just aren't wonderful in the same way they should be. It doesn't make practicing gratitude any less important, it makes it more important, but practicing gratitude is not the same for each individual person. It can be a real challenge to practice thankfulness, when the world seems generally bleak.

COVID-19 has been a good example of how a world can seem not-so-great. I think watching the news or reading about the news or hearing about the news can reveal just how bad things are. When we practice gratitude we can see the positives in the negatives though, so every negative has the potential to have a positive. What about the murders and the abuse and the rape and the many other instances of mistreatment and horrors? I didn't say the acts themselves are positive or good in any way. But maybe they lead to positive things. Maybe the worst president in the history of U.S. presidents just got elected (in your opinion) but you are reminded that they are not in charge of every bill that is passed and they do not have absolute power and that in four years they will either need to be reelected or they will be out on the streets looking for a new job. Maybe something awful happens to someone and you are reminded of how important your family is to you. Maybe although the event was awful and shouldn't have happened, it led to an uproar of awareness campaigns and political change. So, even if gratitude practices seem silly or out of scope with the reality of the problems in our world, they simply aren't. They are good and meaningful and worth spending time on.