Enjoying Any Circumstance In Life Through Gratitude
You don’t have to look far to see someone mention the word gratitude. It’s made its way into the self-help world and the business advice world. And rightfully so. It’s a quality that has effects that can’t be measured, it makes the party expressing gratitude feel better, and it probably indirectly leads to success. It’s rare that you meet ordinary people who are successful that lack gratitude (I’m excluding celebrities and the outliers of success that are in smaller percentiles because of extreme talents), and most of us aren’t attracted to people that are cynical, complainers, and ungrateful.
I’m a person of religious faith, so I place the backdrop of my gratitude toward God. (I bring this up despite how charged the word God is, because most of us aren’t usually using the same definition when we say God.)
I, of course, would never make the claim that a person has to have religious faith to be grateful, but I would point out that once we examine gratitude in a metaphysical sense, I don’t see where one could place their expressions of gratitude without laying it in front of a deity. (These technicalities are just a matter of how we define the words ‘God’ and ‘religion.’)
One need not believe in the God of Abraham to believe in a deity, but to me, technically speaking, a metaphysical gratitude can’t lack an ultimate object to which the gratitude is directed toward. The object could be Buddha, Vishnu, or Zeus, but there must be an object to direct our ultimate expression of gratitude, or we’d just fail to have an ultimate expression at all. An example: if your parent made you dinner, the object receiving your gratitude is your parent. But if you’re grateful for the existence of an abstract concept, like belonging, who or what would be the object receiving your gratitude? It seems like gratitude itself has a relation between giver and receiver, so without the object of the receiver, there can’t be gratitude.
You could decide that you’re grateful to the universe for giving you belonging, but that would mean you’ve now placed the universe as the ultimate object, in a sense designating it a god according to your definition. This example shows the trickiness of what anyone means when they’re aiming to define the concept of God, and this is without even acknowledging the psychological reality that that which you worship most always serves as the God of your existence (whether it be money, wealth, or desire).
I only segue briefly into an explanation of gratitude as an expression toward an ultimate reality, being, or truth for the sake of sharing the use of gratitude through my lens, the lens of a person with religious faith who believes in the God of Abraham. (Who you’ve heard of if you’re familiar with the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.)
If you’re familiar with the Exodus story from the Hebrew Bible, you know that through Moses God led the Israelites out of Egypt. The Hebrew Bible places a great emphasis on the Israelites remembering this happening. It does this for a number of reasons, one of them being that remembrance allows for the most gratitude possible. Many of the mentions of remembrance in the Bible, including the one found in the Ten Commandments, are reminders for the Hebrew people to ‘remember’ their God that took them out of slavery in Egypt. Without remembering and doing so constantly through engagement with scripture, the Hebrew people would forget. They’d then lose their opportunity at gratitude for escaping Egypt, and they’d lose the proper framework gratitude provides for navigating the difficulties of life.
This is something we know. We’ve all experienced friends, family members, peers at work, or strangers that readily forget the good that we do for them. Human nature is quick to lack gratitude. This is why the sports world is known as the world with the short term memory of ‘what have you done for me lately,’ and why we can do large favors for people only to be met with their unwillingness to return a favor or provide a proper thank you for what we’ve done for them. Sometimes gratitude is about the abstract concept of thanking God that belonging exists, sometimes it’s placed in the moment by thanking your parent for dinner, but many times gratitude requires remembering. You have to remember something in order to be grateful for it.
I’ll give you a few examples:
- Someone angry at their spouse for not doing dishes — If they remember that nine out of ten times the spouse does the dishes, they’ll be grateful they chose a spouse who willingly does dishes and give them the benefit of the doubt during the one mishap.
- Someone who is angry about traffic — If they remember the many people in parts of the world who can’t afford cars and rely on faulty public transportation, they’ll be grateful for their chance to sit in traffic and be less annoyed by it. (They can also be grateful that they live in a city with a lot of traffic, because usually that means it’s a pretty cool city.)
- Someone who is working hard at work and tired — If they remember their gratitude for having a well paying job, the mental capacity to work, and think back on the jobs they’ve had that they didn’t like in their lives, they will be grateful.
As we can see, whether you are secular or religious, the Hebrew Bible has lessons to teach us about gratitude.
- What I briefly attempted to summarize, gratitude has to have an object that’s the ultimate recipient of gratitude, even if you aren’t defining the object through the lens of an Abrahamic religion.
- To be grateful we have to remember the past, and remember information we know about the world that reminds us of how fortunate many of us are.
When all else fails, like the Stoics, we can be grateful because hardship is an opportunity for virtue and growth (if we allow it). Or another trick (which I believe I learned from Dennis Prager but I can’t track down the quote), is to think about all the bad things that could have happened to us but didn’t, then we can be grateful that they never happened.
