Gratitude - Blog#25 - 24 November 2019
Precious Package - 1982
Why is Thanksgiving special? What makes it special for you? As a psychologist, the holidays are often difficult for my clients, because they stir up family issues that are more easily avoided at other times of the year. For some, it’s a felt obligation to visit family, requiring immersion in unresolved conflicts. For some it’s wet grief, intense sadness over the loss of a very special person. For others, it’s dry grief, the flat sadness that someone who should have been special wasn’t, and now that they’re gone; that dream is dead. Thanksgiving, like mental health, is about connectedness. It is a time of year when we remind ourselves to count our blessings for what we have, and have had. Which is why those whose attachments have been lost, or mired in conflict, fare more poorly during the holidays compared to those fortunate enough to have solid connectedness to loved ones in the present, or at least gratitude and wet grief over losing them in the past. There are several targets for our gratitude at Thanksgiving, but the gift of life, and the beauty of love (our attachments) are usually on the podium.
Like Christmas, Thanksgiving is one of the more spiritual holidays. In Beyond Atheism, I suggested that spirituality is about connectedness, both external and internal, and about consciousness, particularly the emotions we experience as we contemplate consciousness. We can deliberately access these spiritual emotions (they are also called virtues, because we aspire to feel them). The short list of spiritual virtues/emotions includes awe, gratitude, humility, and love. At Thanksgiving we focus on gratitude.
We experience gratitude when we count our blessings for these gifts of life, nature, and our connections with our mate and other loved ones, present and past. We access existential joy and dread when we contemplate our own life and eventual death, and serenity and gratitude when we move our minds toward accepting this precious but brief gift as it is, without greed for immortality. We count our blessings for what we have, rather than longing for, missing, or craving what we have not. Thus, gratitude can give life meaning, by venerating life itself as a gift. We can also contrast each of the spiritual virtues, or positive spiritual emotions, with their opposite. Gratitude allows us to move beyond negativity, entitlement, and greed. As an antidote to envy and greed, gratitude dampens our preoccupation with what others have that we do not, and our desire for more, more, more. Likewise, experiencing awe allows us to rise above the going-through-the-motions boredom associated with desensitization to our surroundings. Humility moves us beyond the narcissistic trap of pride, while love conquers alienation and anger.
Thanks-giving is our way of reminding ourselves of our good fortune in life, while tempering our frustration, disappointment, and unmet or runaway expectations. While we formally count our blessings at the Thanksgiving table on a day culturally designated for celebration of blessings, religious parents pursue a similar ritual when they teach their children to give thanks to God during their prayers. Sometimes we count our blessings when we see bad fortune befall others; other times we manage our own traumas by reminding ourselves of what we still have, and that we could be worse off. As we work through our grief, we gradually transition from a focus on who and what we lost, to gratitude for the presence of the deceased loved one in our life.
But what if we accessed our gratitude more frequently, and deliberately? Consider using the Three Blessings exercise each evening, as a component of meditation or prayer, to end the day. Allow yourself to think about three things that happened during the day that pleased you the most, and why you believe they happened. Emmons and McCullough (2003) found that doing this exercise on a daily basis for just one week resulted in increased joy and a sense of well-being, while also decreasing depression. Moreover, this improvement was still evident six months later. Try keeping a gratitude journal, in which you write down what you are grateful for, on a daily or at least weekly basis.
In a closely related vein, “savoring” is a term used to describe thought practices that increase our awareness and appreciation of positive experiences in our lives. It involves an application of mindfulness practices. We have the option to set aside time for savoring, for example, carving out time in our busy day to watch the sunset. But we also can learn to catch opportunities to savor experiences on the fly, being mindful rather than mindless. We can wolf our food down while watching television or while driving to our next appointment, thereby practicing time management via multitasking, and proving that we have mastered the English, German, American emphasis on goal-directed productivity. Or we can be mindful during our meals, and savor the flavors with each bite, while experiencing gratitude that such a meal comes so easily nowadays, without having to hunt, gather, or farm ourselves.
Which reminds us that spirituality is largely experienced in the present. Yes, we can appreciate those who have passed, or imagine a reunion in the future, and these connected moments are spiritual, but most spirituality is experienced in the present. It is also accessed by being rather than doing, by contemplating aspects of life, and our own consciousness of it, and the wonder of both, rather than mindlessly marching through our daily doings. We are more spiritual as a human being than as a human doing, contemplating the bigger picture, in the present, with awe, humility, existential joy, gratitude, and connectedness to the “All.” Gratitude dovetails nicely with these other spiritual emotions, of humility, awe, existential joy, and love.
As I approach this Thanksgiving, I am personally mindful of my gifts of life and health, that is, my mere presence within the “All,” and my 69-year-old, still active body. I’ll feel older later, when I can no longer dance or ski. But I’m more focused on my human gifts. In the present, these include my wife and three enthusiastic, competent daughters, and the grandsons they are nurturing and enjoying. I will spend Thanksgiving in West Virginia with Lauren, Mikaela, and Karyn, while Teddy and Lucas run about, and Marsden gathers oohs and ahhs with his winning smile. My human fortune also includes good friends and our shared experiences (watching LSU maul Bama, and tribute bands aplenty), and my camaraderie with staff as we help our clients struggle through the very holidays we are celebrating. In the rearview mirror, I celebrate my grandparents, Elsie and Ed (pictured up topside holding my oldest, Lauren, as an infant). If not for them, your humble narrator would be a mess (okay, I hear you - a bigger mess). Elsie was the embodiment of unconditional love; I will celebrate her legacy by making her tasty peach tarts for my grandsons next week. Gramp was the storyteller, whose humor, sociability, caring, and enthusiasm for life inspired us all. In their absence they continue to give to us everyday. We don’t just remember them, we channel them, and pass their love forward, seeing downstream generations through their eyes. May you do the same, next Thursday, and on all other days that you can muster the mindfulness to count your own blessings.
References:
Chandler, Edward. (2019). Beyond Atheism: A Secular Approach to Spiritual, Moral, and Psychological Practices. Available on Amazon.
Emmons, Robert, & McCullough, M. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: Experimental studies of gratitude and subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 377-389. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.84.2.377.