Is Gratitude good for our lives?

In Most Ways, Gratitude is a Larger Version of Thanksgiving

Gratitude is both a state and a trait (Jans-Beken et al., 2020) and according to Dr. Robert Emmons, the feeling of gratitude involves two stages –

• First, the acknowledgement of goodness in one’s life, affirming that all in all, life is good and has elements that make it worth living.
• Second, gratitude is recognizing that sources of this goodness lie outside ourselves. One can be grateful to our creator, other people, animals, and the world, but not to oneself. At this stage, we recognize that our lives can be fruitful and who to thank for it.

These two stages of gratitude comprise honouring our lives. Through this process, we recognize the worth of everything – the delightful or the hardships- and they all form our lives and ourselves.

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes” – Annie Dillard

And so we are not solely thankful for just the good fat choicest portions but also grateful for the share of the bleak sky we have! Gratitude is like saying, “We are holding them both and confess that even though we were wisest of the wise in our eyes still we keep breaking, making errors and finding the toughest terrains that might linger on more than we anticipated yet we are grateful because they have shaped us to combat for a longer length.”

Gratitude is not a passive emotion that leaves you to sigh over the quandary and do nothing about it. The wonderful thing about gratitude is it makes you a little less anxious about the future and more alive in the present. It lends you the needed energy to find ways to yank through the hardships and allocate resources to maintenance and repair from the tough stuff as a life strategy!

Not everyone and everything has to be pristine and shiny for us to be grateful!

And yet, paradoxically enough, it is in receiving that we most often trip up — for to receive is an act of tremendous trust and tremendous vulnerability. True gratitude has as its object not what is given but what is received. The art of receiving is therefore the precursor to any sense of gratitude — our deepest wellspring of thanks-giving. – Maria Popova

I am not different than you. We all see the same world just different episodes in different timelines. “We like to gripe because it makes us feel better short-term, but long-term it doesn’t help us very much. Like everything else, we do it because we like “easy,” and it can make us feel better in the moment. But as a life strategy? It doesn’t work out so well, it appears.”

That is why letters are a good thing because they are like reminders in our ordinary catastrophes which we would generally not google about. We may google how to ease our backache or how to pop a giant pimple, but gratitude is an extremely far-off problem especially when we are dealing with annoying backache, pimple or to say your boss! And so with all these simple reminders which are just as utterly complex to practice in our real lives, we can together ponder and try to navigate and sift through the changes and caprices of living on this planet.

And as we wind down this year, slowly wrapping it up, I aim to call you to maintain a thanksgiving posture through the rest of our year because all of us – you, me and my neighbour (who I have not seen to date) is fearfully and wonderfully made, and I am grateful for it.

Can we now look at life with a plenteous amount of gratitude!

As we drill through the liturgy of Thanksgiving and the coming holidays (we call Christmas) when the trance of busyness lifts and the blackout curtain of daily demands parts to let the radiance in, we are not to censor or filter out the pain from the delightful moments of life. To answer “When you feel down in the dumps or find yourself in a funk, how do you cope?”