Grat­i­tude Trumps Thanks

I recently had a long chat with my ther­a­pist and super­vi­sor, Glo­ria Tay­lor. It was a kind of mixed bag con­ver­sa­tion, some of which had to do with express­ing grat­i­tude. Dar­bella and I later dis­cussed some of the con­ver­sa­tion, and I thought back to my upbring­ing, and espe­cially thought about my mom. I said that I remem­bered my mom as hav­ing a good gift for find­ing the right words to politely say “thank you,” but that this did not seem to me to be the same as grat­i­tude.

My mom was end­lessly polite. On the other hand, when alone with fam­ily, she was highly judg­men­tal and, I sus­pect, quite angry. Her anger had much to do with her sense of enti­tle­ment. (One of her famous quotes, when thwarted, was, “Don’t they know who I am???”) I said to Dar, “I sus­pect that mom thought that the things she had were her due, as opposed to gifts.” Thus, say­ing “thank you” was, for her, a social polite­ness thing, and as such was nei­ther sin­cere nor heartfelt.

This con­ver­sa­tion came up as I was bemoan­ing, with Glo­ria and Dar­bella, some ‘lack’ in my life. I have a bad habit of notic­ing what I don’t have (and then mak­ing myself mis­er­able over it) as opposed to being grate­ful for what I do have. I have belat­edly begun to real­ize that liv­ing this way is a major method for stay­ing out of the state of Sim­ple Pres­ence. I am so invested in ‘have not’ that I lose pres­ence with my present reality.

I made the leap to real­iz­ing that liv­ing in a state of present and per­sis­tent grat­i­tude for what­ever life brings is infi­nitely more use­ful than end­lessly bemoan­ing the things my imag­i­na­tion thinks are missing.

I had never before tried to ‘lan­guage’ the dif­fer­ence between ‘say­ing thanks’ and grat­i­tude. While I rec­og­nize that this is very much lin­guis­tic game-playing, let’s try it this way: express­ing thanks is a for­mal dec­la­ra­tion or a social equa­tion, while grat­i­tude is a sense of being hum­bled as I rec­og­nize that I have been given some­thing I haven’t earned.

Another, hack­neyed way of putting this is this—I think it is impor­tant to count my blessings.

Our prac­ti­cal, con­sumerist natures believe in value given for an equal value received. This is so ingrained that we equate “free” with “worth­less.” An inter­est­ing exam­ple of this exists on a web­site called www.giveawayoftheday.com Each day they give away a piece of com­mer­cial soft­ware. Below the direc­tions for installing the soft­ware is a blog where peo­ple can leave com­ments. Some peo­ple have tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties installing the soft­ware, some write to say ‘thanks!’ and a lot of peo­ple gripe and moan that the soft­ware is not what they wanted, or that there are bet­ter options, or some other often mean-spirited com­plaint. I’m amazed and a bit rueful.

I would like to sug­gest to you that each of us has much to be grate­ful for—and that the vast major­ity of this ‘stuff’—my skills, tal­ents, abil­i­ties, what I know, how open I am to doing new things—this ‘stuff’ is sim­ply a free gift from ‘the cos­mos’, no strings attached.

Clients of mine, for exam­ple, know that I often say I know what story to tell or where to push dur­ing Body­work because I hear a lit­tle voice “in my left ear.” I mean this quite literally—I do ‘hear’ such advice and always fol­low it.

Never once has it occurred to me to express grat­i­tude for this advice. At one level, I could argue that I am sim­ply talk­ing to myself, so why bother. How­ever, on a much deeper and pro­found level, how can I not rec­og­nize that life itself is a gift? Where I live, my skill set, the work I do—all of it is ‘stuff’ I have been given—it is not some­thing I earned.

Now, this seems so sim­ple and obvi­ous as to almost not need express­ing, but some­how I’ve man­aged to get to 56 with­out really think­ing about this one. I rec­og­nize that I, and I alone, have cre­ated my life. Being the self-responsibility junkie that I am, I cer­tainly own up to the deci­sions I have made, as well as their con­se­quences. Self-responsibility, how­ever, is not the same as an ego-driven sense of imperiousness.

The cos­mos is always in bal­ance, and being ‘gifted’ is just that—a gift. There­fore, the only pos­si­ble response to a pro­found gift is pro­found gratitude.

It seems to me that grat­i­tude tran­scends sim­ply say­ing ‘thank you,’ although that’s a good place to start. Being ‘beyond grat­i­tude’ is a sense of awe for life itself—for the way that things seem to come together, for the peo­ple who come into my life, for the lessons that push me deeper while call­ing me to soar.

Now, let’s turn our atten­tion to the other aspect of this topic—those who see their gifts as a bur­den. In this case, the com­plaint is that with the gift (tal­ents, abil­i­ties) comes an implicit demand to use the gift. Rather than delight­ing in the oppor­tu­nity the gift presents, the recip­i­ent resents or attempts to ignore the gift. Remem­ber: there is no light­en­ing bolt from the sky, no pun­ish­ment for ignor­ing one’s gifts. There is just an under­ly­ing sense of sad­ness, incom­plete­ness, and regret.

I sus­pect the way out of all of this is to remind one­self of the bless­ing that comes for liv­ing grate­fully. I am not turn­ing this into one more oblig­a­tion. It just seems to me that open­ing one’s eyes in the morn­ing and express­ing grat­i­tude for another day is a start. Lying in bed at night and remem­ber­ing the bless­ings of the day is head­ing in the right direction.

I wear a wrist Mala (Bud­dhist prayer beads) and take it off at night. I have taken to express­ing my grat­i­tude tak­ing the Mala off at night and putting it on each morning.

Reminders are help­ful, as grat­i­tude is not nat­ural for many of us.

At some level, acknowl­edg­ing the mys­tery and gift­ed­ness of our lives is a pow­er­ful tool that brings us deeper. To acknowl­edge that much of life is out of our con­trol, and equally out of our cre­ation, is hum­bling in a good way. This is reflected in John Lennon’s lyric, “Life is what hap­pens to us while we are busy mak­ing other plans.” Much in life that exists just out of view, and is best seen out of the cor­ner of our eye, or heard in “left ear whispers.”

The uni­verse itself is a gift to us, as is each moment of our lives. Acknowl­edg­ment is required, and its form is unceas­ing gratitude.