Gratitude: If You Look You Will be Amazed

Gratitude is the source of enduring happiness. We have a tendency, myself included, to pursue all sorts of things in the world in the hope that achieving them will make us happy, not realizing that key to happiness sits within us. All we need to do to unlock happiness is to cultivate gratitude. David Steindl-Rast makes precisely this point in his Ted Talk on the topic.

In this talk David tells us that we commonly make the mistake of thinking that it is happiness that makes us grateful. He thinks this is a mistake because he thinks we have inverted the relationship. It is not happiness that makes us grateful, it is gratitude that makes us happy.

We experience gratitude when we experience that something really valuable has been freely given to us, we haven’t bought it, we haven’t earned it, we haven’t traded something in to get it. When we experience something that is really valuable to us is freely given then gratitude spontaneously arises within us and happiness spontaneously arising along with it. This is an existential truth and can be proved by taking note of the experience of gratitude.

Gratitude is essential in other ways to. Gratitude is the root of courage. Courage is the ability to put one’s own self on the line in order to do what is right. Courage is a matter of being able to endure what is potentially harmful if doing so is appropriate. Now it is another existential truth that courage requires trust. In order to willing put oneself on the line we need to be convinced that we do not need to look after our own interests. If we are grateful, i.e. words we experience that we have been given immense value freely without having earned it, we will have the capacity to trust. We will not feel like we need to look after ourselves, we will trust that we will be looked after. Gratitude then breeds trust which frees us up to do what is appropriate even if doing so seems to conflict with our self-interest.

So it seems clear that all of us should aim to live gratefully, to cultivate an overtone of gratitude in every moment that we are in. I recognize from personal experience that this is not the easiest thing to do. It is part of the human condition to slip into resentment about what we don’t have and to focus only on what we feel we deserve.

I had a couple of really innocuous experiences recently that made me aware of a point relevant to the possibility of living gratefully. The first experience was really innocuous. Just yesterday my phone charger stopped working, then shortly afterwards my laptop charger. I was of course really frustrated because i couldn’t do what I wanted to do. The second experience I had was slightly more profound but illustrated the same point. I was talking to a friend of mine about masters and the stress of it. She was telling me how her masters was going and casually told me that it has been difficult because her multiple sclerosis has gotten worse recently. I didn’t know she had ms and the revelation threw me.

Now there are no doubt many things to be taken away from these two experiences, there is a lot to said about my friend’s perseverance in the face of a serious illness and her capacity to be upbeat even when facing such a disturbing condition. On reflection however, the one thing that struck e most about these two experiences is that I spend most of my life absolutely oblivious to the gifts I am freely given which in fact have a huge value to me, even though I am mostly oblivious to their existence. My life is constantly supplemented by the value of my working chargers. This value is always there, it exists in each moment of my life, it is something to be grateful for, but it is a value I am completely oblivious to. Similarly my life is constantly accompanied with and supplemented by the value of not having a terminal illness. This is something, if I were to reflect on, I should feel absolutely grateful for, but for the majority of my life I am completely oblivious to this thing of value.

Now my examples may be a little bit silly but the point I feel they illustrate is not. We are pickled in blessing. Our lives are filled with value that we cant account for on the basis of our own personal ingenuity. How much of this am I (are we) unaware of? The vast majority of it no doubt. Start taking note of these things, I am sure you will find these blessings pile up immeasurably. If that happens you will live gratefully and will be happy and courageous.