On Being Grateful

5 minute read

There used to be this moment when I was at home with my baby girl and my toddler son when we would Try To Leave The House. This was - and still is - the time I am most likely to lose my patience. Sitting on the floor, crippled with sleep deprivation – I had been awake for a year – I would quickly become overwhelmed by socks, shoes, gloves, hats, nappy bags and scooter helmets.

And then we would emerge from the house and the air would be fresh and the sun would be shining, and I would turn to my three-year-old boy and say, What a beautiful day. And he would walk ahead of me pushing his little suitcase and I would stare at him and my girl in her buggy and I would be hit by an astonishing wave of gratitude. They were alive. They were healthy. All was well.

Of course, this was often accompanied by a wave of guilt and remorse for having lost it in the first place. What was wrong with me, I would ask myself? How could a grown woman be so undone by a pair of shoes? But then my son would look back at me and say in his own tone of gratitude, Yes Mama what a beautiful day and we would walk on, into the gratitude, and I would feel forgiven.

How transforming it is to express gratitude. It never fails to bring you out of one place and into another. According to scientists creating a habit of expressing gratitude can help us in a myriad of ways, from boosting feelings of abundance to increasing our resilience. It also strengthens relationships, decreases feelings of fear and anxiety and improves our sleep. It even creates lasting changes in the brain: once you express gratitude the prefrontal cortex becomes more sensitive to future experiences of gratitude.

And then the pandemic started and I began to notice how often I and my friends prefaced our conversations about how we were doing with: I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong… or I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, I could have it a lot worse….

At first, I thought this smacked of a humanity, a stoicism, I admired. We knew others had it worse and we knew how to get on with it. We had kept our perspective. But then I began to detect something a bit defended in these conversations as if we were not really opening up at all and I began to wonder: were we really worried someone would judge us ungrateful? Had we really bought into the idea that we could not speak of our pain if it was not as great as someone else’s? And who got to decide who was worse off anyway? Or did it go deeper than that? Were we using gratitude as a shield against deeper feelings, the ones of abandonment and betrayal, as we lurched on with home school, working from home, the food shops for mum and dad…As if we didn’t all have a right to complain – cooped up in our homes, trying to home-school and work, alive with loneliness.

Because no one is grateful all the time. That’s the thing. It’s a fleeting emotion. And it is all the more poignant and powerful for its fleetingness. We do it such a disservice when we try to pin it down or hold on to it or make it our default. Of course, you could say this about all emotions. Matt Haig, the novelist and mental health influencer, knows this. “You are not your feelings,” he writes on Instagram, “You just experience them. Anger, sadness, hate, depression, fear. This is the rain you walk in. But you don’t become the rain. You know the rain will pass. You walk on. And you remember the soft glow of the sun that will come again.” In other words anxiety, fear, depression, gratitude all come and go, if we let them. This is mindfulness. It can take a lot of practice and awareness to be still in the present moment and let it go.

Here’s Seneca, the philosopher:

It is only from such a place of gratefulness that we can perform beautiful acts — from a place of absolute, ravishing appreciation for the sheer wonder of being alive at all, each of us an improbable and temporary triumph over the staggering odds of nonbeing and nothingness inking the ledger of spacetime. But because we are human, because we are batted about by the violent immediacies of everyday life, such gratitude eludes us as a continuous state of being. We access it only at moments, only when the trance of busyness lifts and the blackout curtain of daily demands parts to let the radiance in, those delicious moments when we find ourselves awash in nonspecific gladness, grateful not to this person, grateful not for this turn of events, but grateful at life — diffuse gratitude that irradiates every aspect and atom of the world, however small, however unremarkable, however, coated with the dull patina of habit. In those moments, everything sings, everything shimmers. In those moments, we are most alive.

I try, after writing this article, to include gratitude when I and my children leave the house. What lovely socks, I say to my children. Aren’t we so lucky to have these socks? My daughter looks at me, opens her mouth to speak, and closes it again. I take up my son’s shoes. And look at these! We’ve got such great wear out of these. They stare at me, and then at each other. Lovely socks, says my daughter. Yes, says my son. Then we walk, a little straighter, and a little taller, out of the house.

I wonder how long it will last.
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Nikki Walsh, April 2021