TEN TRUE THINGS ABOUT GRATITUDE
Gratefulness not only changes your life, but also extends beyond your
intimate sphere. It gives rise to compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and empathy, and thus informs how we treat others and how we act in the larger world.
~ Kristi Nelson
1. Gratefulness is not circumstantial or
conditional.
Though they’re often used interchangeably, Kristi differentiates between “gratitude” and “gratefulness.” Gratitude, she says, is more transactional and reactive—a response to a specific incident or circumstance: “I feel grateful when X happens.”
“We experience gratitude when we get or experience something we want,” she explains. “It’s much more difficult to experience gratitude when life delivers us less—or more—than we bargained for. Having more gratitude can be like another thing that we put on our to-do list, so we end up trying to orchestrate experiences in order to feel more gratitude, and we’re often disappointed if we don’t have those experiences.”
Kristi thinks of gratefulness, on the other hand, as an overall orientation to life. “When we wake up in the morning and experience a sense of gratefulness just for the fact of being alive, with our heart and senses open to the gifts and opportunities of another day, it’s a more radical approach to gratitude that’s not contingent on something happening to us,
but rather a way that we arrive to life.”
2. We can practice being grateful for what we take for granted.
Thich Nhat Hanh famously said, “When we have a toothache, we know that not having a toothache is happiness. But later, when we don’t have a toothache, we don’t treasure our non-toothache.” Or to put it the other way around,
in the words of Joni Mitchell, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
“What people often experience when they’ve lost something is gratefulness when it returns,” Kristi says. “When you lose your electricity for two days, you’re so grateful when it comes back and you can flip the light switch and get
light. Or you almost have a terrible accident but you’re saved by grace, and you sit there and say, ‘I’m so grateful to be alive.’”
But, in a surprisingly short time, that feeling can go away and we default to our baseline expectations, assumptions, and even entitlement. A daily practice of gratitude, Kristi
says, is the key to appreciating all the things we tend to take for granted. “The core practice of gratefulness is to truly notice, to be present to the gifts of our lives from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we go to bed at night READ MORE
