Grateful to Be Alive
What a thing it is to be alive, to see the many shades of the sky, feel the softness of the moss, listen to the wind rustle the leaves. Even to know the sharp stab of loss is a gift, because the pain means we’ve known love. In the face of disaster and death, we can still be grateful for having lived.
When we are grateful, we feel better. It’s true that we all struggle with something. Life wounds us. We have limitations. Maybe we’re blind, or lonely, or have lost limbs. Yet we can still be grateful for whatever senses we do have, for the parts of our body that work, the friendly people of the world, the joy of music, each breath. Life is hard, but it is wonderful, as well. Gratitude reminds of us that.
When all is said and done, focusing on our blessings can be a blessing. Sometimes, though, we use gratitude to keep us from feeling our emotions. As the song says, when we start to feel sad or angry, when we’ve been hurt, we can “simply remember [our] favorite things, and then [we] don’t feel so bad.” [1] There’s something to be said for this. There’s also something to be said for allowing ourselves to feel whatever ails us.
Counting Our Blessings
Soon it will be Thanksgiving, that day when we count life’s blessings. Not everyone feels blessed. In the hospital where I work, I lead a group. At the end, I invite the participants to share one thing they’re grateful for. Every once in a while, someone says, “Nothing.” At that moment, in that place, they feel so miserable, nothing seems good.
That’s okay. Can we not honor such distress without trying to make it better?
As a chaplain working with patients, I’m pretty good at that. When my mother refused to name a gratitude, however, I was less accepting. One Thanksgiving toward the end of my her life, as we took turns sharing what we were grateful for, she couldn’t think of anything. I was incredulous. As far as I was concerned, she had thousands of things to be grateful for, and I started to list some of them. That was not helpful. She wasn’t grateful for anything I suggested, nor was she grateful for anything else, either.
In general, my mother wasn’t big on gratitude. I suspect she felt betrayed by life. She longed for a love she never found, the career she wanted was cut short by illness, and she never recovered from her own mother’s death when she’d been a young and uncertain mother herself.
Not that she didn’t find happiness. She had friends, hobbies, a nice home, cats for company. But she had a hard time letting go of her hurts, and as she neared 90, one loss after another began to wear her down. What right did I have to judge her? If she felt cheated instead of blessed, who was I to say she shouldn’t? Maybe her bitterness kept her going, her anger motivated her to rise each day.
The Determination to Create Change
Happiness is great, but it doesn’t give us determination, grit, or the fortitude we need to change the things that need to change. Gratitude makes us content with our lot. When our lot is unacceptable, we might do better to get mad.
Of course, if we can’t change our situation, gratitude might be the thing that keeps us sane. If our leg is gone or our kidneys have stopped working, if our house has burned to the ground, we can’t dial back time and retrieve what was taken. It takes time to get over the shock of a loss or a terminal diagnosis. For a while, we may act as if we could rewrite reality. Eventually, though, most of them realize that done is done. No matter how hard we fight, no matter who we complain to, the only thing we can change about their situation is how we respond.
As Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer says, life goes better for us when we find “the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,” yet we also need “the courage to change the things we can.” Courage rarely comes from counting our blessings. It comes from naming the wrongs in this world and believing it’s possible to make things better. As Niebuhr points out, without the wisdom to tell which is which, however, we, and those around us, will suffer.
Gratitude as a Weapon
Sometimes, though, people don’t care if we suffer or not. For instance, few wealthy Americans appear concerned about the hardships of the poor. Indeed, if the marginalized complain, if they demand the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the rich become nervous. For the poor to be comfortable, they might have to give up some of their fortune. All of us are averse to loss, so we tend to fight for what we have, even if we have more than any one person could ever use.
So it’s not surprising that when the oppressed revolt, the ruling class uses all kinds of weapons to shatter them. Totalitarian regimes around the world silence the opposition through censorship and propaganda, threats and lies, with laws that limit voting and independence and self-determination. If these tactics don’t stop the uprising, they will imprison their enemies or kill them outright. In the United States, we do this, too. Very few nations in the world don’t.
Along with these strategies, we may also use gratitude. When workers complain that they don’t earn enough to pay for rent and also eat, hey’re sometimes told it’s their own fault, but they may also be told to be grateful for what they have. They could be sleeping on the streets of India or fleeing from war. Being grateful can help us heal, but when we’re told to stop complaining, that tons of people have it worse than we do, that we shouldn’t get uppity or make waves, gratitude becomes a cudgel.
Relationships and Debt
We can use gratitude against others in other ways, as well. Many times I have listened to patients rant about ungrateful children or spouses or friends. “I sacrificed everything for them, and now when I need help, they’re not there.”
Generosity is good. We praise the man who gives strangers the shirt off his back. Most of us feel good when we step in to help someone. But too often, we give out of our own need, not the need of others. Not everyone wants our shirt. Sometimes we misdiagnose the problem, and we try to fix what’s not broken. Why would anyone be grateful for that?
At other times, we step in when someone’s perfectly capable of handling things on their own. Then we can create more resentment than appreciation.
On the other hand, some people do take advantage of others. There’s an unspoken rule in most cultures that we give a little, then get a little. It’s like the informal debt cycle that David Graeber describes in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. A neighbor helps me with my yard work, and later I watch her house while she’s away. We don’t make a formal tally sheet, but as we give back and forth, the debt we owe tends to balance out. That’s how we maintain relationships, through a mostly even give and take. [2]
Generosity’s Shadow
When people don’t give back, however, resentment builds up. Those who abuse the good will of others eventually have to move on, because their current circle of friends gets angry. You might say those friends should be grateful they’re not so thoughtless, or that they have something to give, and that’s true. There’s always something to be grateful for.
When someone is abusing us, however, whether they abuse us physically or mentally or by taking until we have nothing left to give, anger may be more appropriate than gratitude. Some people learn when they’ve been rejected. The hurt wakes them up, and they change. Regardless of how the other person reacts, however, anger can get us out of an unhealthy situation, and it can keep us from being harmed in the future. Sometimes gratitude keeps us stuck.
Generosity can keep us stuck, a well. The compulsive givers among us tend to lose our shirts, not just give them away. When we feel we have been taken advantage of, we may cling to our holier-than-thou resentments. If we find ourselves stuck in our grief and our rage, we might want to reconsider our approach to life. We might even want to try focusing on gratitude. If we do, we might find our anger eases. When our anger dissipates, we can observe more clearly. Then we can look at our values, consider the consequences of our actions, and decide how we want to respond in the future.
Making a Choice
Gratitude is a virtue. Anger is a sin. Yet all good things have a shadow side, and all our shadows start as gifts. We’ve already seen how we can use gratitude against others, or how we can use it to avoid feelings we don’t like. Our gifts, including our desire to help, our longing for relationship, our urge to make a difference, can all lead to resentment when we feel betrayed or shame or impotent. Not even love is all good. Love not only leads to loss, for everything must end sometime, but it can lead to jealousy, as well.
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heaven” (Eccl 3:1 NIV). There is a time for acceptance, and a time for courage; a time for gratitude, and a time for rage. Gratitude can oppress us or liberate us. We get to choose.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- Hammerstien II, Oscar and Richard Rogers, “My Favorite Things,” Williamson Music, 1959.
- Graeber, David, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014.
Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash
Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.
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