Thankfulness: Here and Now

What is gratitude?

Of all the things in life you can truly be most grateful for, thankfulness might top the list. A root foundation of authentic appreciation for the things, people and conditions you’re glad about is the rock your mental house is built on. 

It’s the springboard for all sorts of development, evolution, forward momentum and growth. 

With a little practise and dedication, this core spirit of cherishing the best parts of your experience becomes a habitual background state of mind that underlies everything you do, like a hidden superpower that protects you from woes of all kinds. 

So we hear a lot about being thankful these days, but as always in our discussions, it’s helpful upfront to know what it’s not.  (For our purposes here, despite certain semantic distinctions, we’ll treat thankfulness and gratitude as synonymous.)

Thankfulness isn’t a discipline you’re trained in, an ideology or a meditation practise – (not necessarily, though it can be a component of meditative focus) –  and it doesn’t have to mean gratitude in the religious sense of thanking the divine for bounty bestowed. 

It’s not an effort to induce some otherwise unnatural state, or to trick yourself into believing you’re better off than realistically you are. 

Quite the opposite, in fact.  Feeling thankful is simply the natural sense of satisfaction that emerges from not failing to pay attention to the things around you that buoy you or cheer you.

And, similarly to being mindful, once you start remembering to take note, you automatically begin to perceive tons more things to be grateful for all the time, so there’s an upbeat snowball effect!  

(A caveat, though. Thankfulness is much more than merely cultivating the awareness that others have it worse than you. There will always be those whose sufferings and deficits vastly exceed your own, it’s true.  But being grateful that you don’t have it as rough as some isn’t very positive thankfulness; you won’t feel inspired winning a pain contest.)

Thankfulness is for the big and small stuff. 

You can be profoundly glad that you can see and hear and walk and others can’t. Those are gigantic benefits.  But you can also love that new coffee mug and be thrilled you have it each time you drink from it.  You can feel attractive with your new haircut.  You’ve discovered you like sushi?  Bonus!  You live near water, or good restaurants?  Sweet!  

It’s all good, you see, whatever you hold dear.  The tiny stuff isn’t little if your feeling of good fortune is huge.

Being thankful is a chemical thing. It releases the neurotransmitters dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin that spark joy and excitement and soothe you, acting in strikingly similar ways to anti-depressants. 

The bottomline is that it is simply psychologically inconsistent to feel as sad or anxious or angry as you otherwise might while also celebrating your assets. They’re incompatible states that are mutually exclusive.  Humbly appreciative and bummed out don’t mix!

This doesn’t mean, of course, that just feeling lucky will magically erase the burden of your legitimate problems and stresses. That’s unrealistic. But it has the direct effect of reducing it.

And, like mindfulness, thankfulness is primarily present-centered, while depression tends to perceive a lost, happier past, and anxiety dreads the future. 

Again, its sources are endless once you commence detecting them. There’s just so much to be grateful for in each of our lives that, once you start identifying it all, it’s virtually infinite.  

Even the simple self-gift of an optimistic spirit, expecting that things will always get better even when they’re terrible, can make the difference between a brooding, sour outlook and one that greets the road ahead with excitement. 

So.  What if the good ol’ days are now, but they’re slipping away hour by hour, year by year, as we fail to realize?  Time is our only real wealth, yet it is as fleeting as our attention. 

Savor!  Cherish!  Don’t forget!  This too shall pass, the good and the bad, and you only get one trip, so give thanks for the future nostalgia and for the resilience to keep the hard times in healthy perspective.  

When that habit is formed, your frame of mind will be transformed, in ways that will surprise and delight you.  You’ll focus on where you’ve got it good, and soon you might even think you’ve got it made!

Because the fact is you do!  You just think otherwise sometimes.  Sure, there will always be trials, losses, regrets, even traumas. 

But fresh eyes bring new insights, fledgling hopes.  Raise a toast to your new skill of looking around to count your blessings!