Keep Returning to Gratitude

Tis’ the season for gratitude! I have a great deal to be grateful about this Thanksgiving season. This will be my first holiday season as a married man. I have a healthy family. The gifts of my education still reward me on a daily basis. I have been sober for over 14 years, connected with a beloved community of recovering people on a spiritual path. I am grateful for the simple things like clean water, a working lawn mower, a beautiful city with hiking trails, the diverse flora and fauna that surround nature. And gratitude lists…of course. 

A moment of confession, I will admit that I have not been writing down and sharing my gratitude lists recently. Over the last few years, I’ve had a group of friends in recovery share daily gratitude text chains - lists for days. It can get obnoxious at times. I will go overboard and send my entire network with gratitude texts. It’s hilarious, but so good. I never create and send a gratitude list and regret it afterwards. Gratitude is like that, love is like that and forgiveness. I’ve never practiced forgiveness or love or gratitude and felt like I made a mistake.

For that reason, I keep returning to gratitude. It’s attractive. It remains attractive. Why not return to gratitude?

Out of all the emotional states to call home, gratitude is one of the most noble and spiritually resonant.

But, like any living relationship worthwhile, my relationship to gratitude must be built, practiced, cultivated, nurtured. How often do I neglect to do the things that I know will bring me a sense of peace, faith, lightness, gratitude?   

As we move through the seasons of life, it’s easy to forget that it’s our responsibility to cultivate gratitude. I had to learn this lesson through struggle, and yet I forget! I still forget how essential gratitude is and excuse myself from the practice, from the relationship. I think most of us forget (to a greater or lesser extent) that we need to continuously cultivate a relationship to gratitude, to love, to acceptance, etc. We forget that we are responsible for our dominant emotional states, and that mostly these (our) dominant emotional states are repeated throughout our lives. These patterns can be difficult to identify and even more difficult to change. 

Our emotional states give us indispensable information about the world and ourselves and along with our behavior end up shaping our character. It was only recently in the history of psychology that we really started digging into emotion and the brain. It was even more recent that the history of psychology began to study human potential and understand that the human mind could be self-directed into emotional states; that through practice the human mind can be taught to heal, to overcome depression, anxiety, disorder, and to elevate emotional experiences like gratitude, over and above states of boredom, disillusionment, fear. 

So we would do well to remember we are the creators of our lives, but the idea that we can take 100% responsibility for our emotional states, for the cultivation of gratitude, love, humility, etc. is still (historically speaking) very new and not widely adopted. For the most part we behave as though asleep, like passive actors on the stage of life. And there is an immense amount of data to support that conclusion. It’s normal and natural to experience sadness when we don’t get what we want or fail to fulfill a goal. It’s reasonable and expected to feel grief when we lose a loved one, to feel the unexpected joy when a long forgotten friend gives us a call, to feel frightened and angry when our employer discontinues benefits.

We believe that our emotions are predominantly responses to external stimuli, through and through. And gratitude, as pleasant as it is, is just another response to external events: Who among us hasn’t felt raptured by the sea; witnessed a numinous sunrise over the mountains, felt the presence of awe in nature or human art?

At times, gratitude does break through our normal, everyday patterns of thought and emotion. It wakes us up. But those moments of grace do not endure the passage of time because they are fleeting events, random circumstances unfolding in the world. We still hold the belief that these moments of grace and gratitude have very little if anything to do with our internal world, our agency, our will.

So, it's easy to conclude that all of us are fundamentally victims of circumstances who generally live in a state of waiting for gratitude or love or grace to happen to us. And amazingly enough, it definitely does. We live in a world where unexpected grace and gratitude do break through, despite our generalized neglect. 

In my own life, there have been times when I live in response to external events. I respond with as much skillfulness as I can in the moment and enjoy or suffer the consequences as they befall me. I also know that I have had profound moments of grace where I get access to a non-ordinary state of consciousness - flooded with gratitude or awe. They are momentary awakenings that beckon me into a new relationship that I am called to attend, nurture, cultivate. 

Most of life is this interplay between agency and surrender, between wakefulness and sleep. I do well to remember that my relationship with gratitude (with God even) started at the end of my belief, originated out of a long and painful slumber and out of necessity to heal and transform my life. How long can one endure living life as a victim?

I had spent years attempting to medicate my unresolved pain only to find that what I was really suffering from was an emotional-spiritual problem. I had spent an immense amount of time in a depressed spiritual state - saturated in emotions of apathy, guilt, disbelief, judgment, obsession and my body ‘kept the score,’ and the very circumstances of my life reflected my own internal condition of victimization. 

When I got sober, I started awakening, to practice gratitude, to build a relationship with gratitude as a spiritual presence. I learned first hand about cultivating a relationship with spiritual principles.

What I discovered restructured my belief system. I no longer believe that I am a victim of circumstances. Rather, I understand experience and all of reality to be an intimate dynamic interplay of relationships and participation. 

The more that I take responsibility for gratitude, for that relationship, the more I attract external circumstances to be grateful for. The more I practice gratitude lists, moments of stillness, submerging myself in the silence of water, expressing gratitude toward my friends with a phone call and towards my work with discipline, the more I experience a waking life of grace and gratitude.

Once in an interview with the famed golfer, Arnold Palmer he was asked about his astounding round of luck and I think his response sums it up: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”