On gratitude

I want to write about gratitude. It's a concept that's thrown about all the time in daily life - count your blessings, every cloud has a silver lining, there but for the grace of God... Its also something that's used a lot these days when talking about wellbeing. Brene Brown discusses how she found in her research that joyful people were consistently the ones who practiced gratitude -  and that's gratitude as an active verb there (TED talks available, or you can read her books).

I'm not a naturally optimistic person. In fact without the wonders of modern medicine doing something complicated in my brain I tend towards a state of melancholy. Yet, somehow or other, I've ended up with many wonderful things in my life. And I'm not talking about the privilege I benefit from everyday being a white, educated woman, with no disabilities, in a developed country and not being in a war zone - although of course this is something I'm acutely concious of.

No, I mean my current situation. Somehow, from an awful and deeply distressing crisis, I have ended up in a lovely, warm home (the warm part is a particular plus - my last house was freezing and draughty), in the most beautiful of areas. I was worried about some work things, and they seem to have resolved themselves for the best as well. I had to say goodbye to my darling Cleo cat, but Merlin and Pandora are thriving. I have friends who actively keep in contact and check in on me. I have family who care for me and want me there for family celebrations and Christmas. Somehow I've ended up with pretty much everything I ever wanted.

So in all these ways am I blessed, and I should be grateful. And of course I am. Gratitude is a tricky concept though. You can list off things you are grateful for until the cows come home, but unless you actually feel it, it's just words. 

I find it a complicated thing. You can use gratitude to paint over the cracks, and ignore the big, awful things that you really need to sit with and feel. And you have to be really careful to avoid any sense of entitlement - because you certainly don't deserve good things more than anybody else, while at the same time knowing that you also don't deserve bad things either. 

So for me, I need to step back from the everyday usage of gratitude. All to often it feels like meaningless platitudes to me. I don't wake up in the morning and list off three things I'm grateful for.  Instead I try to sit with myself regularly and take stock of where things are. 

To use an analogy, if my roof is leaky I don't just think I'm grateful for having a roof, and ignore the problem. I need to sit with the problem, identify all the feelings I'm having about it, work out solutions, and then when my roof is fixed and I take stock again, I can feel genuine gratitude. That's a tricky one for me as I really don't like thinking or feeling bad things and naturally try to avoid them, but I've learned through hard experience that ignoring them is infinitely worse for my mental health.

So as I'm sitting here and writing this, I'm taking stock. Buddhism says life is suffering, and only through letting go of all worldly and material  things can we achieve true peace. Yet suffering is also how we develop and grow. I'm sure we've all heard tell of someone somebody knows, who has lived a very sheltered life and who has never encountered any hardship, but who is very shallow and dull. 

Personally I don't believe any such a person actually exists. Everybody has story, and we only ever see the very tip of the iceberg. Underneath everyone we encounter there are untold depths. The Jewish faith says every person is an entire universe, and when you think about it, so they are.

But I digress. Life certainly contains suffering and the majority of us don't wish to give up all worldly and material concerns to deal with it. The older you get the more suffering you carry with you. 

Gratitude for me starts with acknowledging all that pain. Certainly not welcoming it - it's bloody horrible, but sitting with it. Accepting that everyone has suffering and misfortune, and that your suffering is not entirely unique. That you are not a particular victim, but that suffering it instead part of the human condition. 

Then at the same time I need to genuinely realise and feel that there are also good things. Without acknowledging the bad, I can not be grateful for the good. I would just be playing pretend, ignoring the leaky roof and pretending I'm not soaking wet. 

So it's a tricky concept, and a complicated feeling. However, it can also be a much more profound feeling when taken as part of the whole life package, than it would be if just felt in a casual throwaway sense. 

It's definitely something to be aimed for. Brene Brown's research isn't wrong - joyful people are consistently grateful, and that's almost certainly a causal effect. But that gratitude grows from accepting there is a lot of bad stuff, and then acknowledging that there is also good and being grateful for that, rather than being blindly optimistic and hoping that repeating 3 times you have a roof over your head will magically fix the leak.

So as I take stock I'm accepting that a really horrible situation happened to me, and that it made me feel terrified and anxious. I'm accepting that no doubt life will thrown awful things my way again, and that there are currently people going through really terrible things. But that without minimising any of that, right now I'm okay, and that I have these good things to enjoy and appreciate. So when I say I'm so very, very grateful for them, that is something I mean in the most heartfelt of ways.