Practicing Gratitude
This time of year has always held a special place in my life. For a while, Thanksgiving was this three-day celebration with my family, complete with late night walks and hide and seek on Craigville Beach, football, eccentric talent show productions, and a house full of food, games and my favorite people in the world. As a kid, drinking wasn’t a significant part of the holiday for me. It was nothing more complicated for me than spending uncut time with my people at a mega slumber party. I’m blessed to have a big family with a lot of love; we have our imperfections and conflicts, but the love is always there. It’s the connective tissue that keeps us in touch throughout the year and pulls even tighter in the times we’re together on occasions such as this one. I went through a period of time when large gatherings, including Thanksgiving, gave me more social anxiety than appreciation for this amazing family, and I learned to lean on alcohol in my attempt to recapture that childhood feeling of what the holiday had always been for me before my perspective developed fine print and between-the-lines confusions. I craved that three-day haze of happiness more than anything, especially in the days when personal loss had taken that sense of joy and security away from me; alcohol was my only known surety to erase pain and replace it with a fuzziness akin to the easy joy of connection I had before.
In a sea of people, even people you know and love, it’s easy to forget that everyone is a unique person also dealing with their own storms of experience accumulated in the days and nights spent apart. My family traditionally dresses up for Thanksgiving dinner, so on the surface level, it appears that everyone is doing great. The pictures show a massive crowd of relatively tall people, smiling and looking pretty put together. You wouldn’t be able to guess from the photographic evidence which of us was struggling with anxiety or depression, who was legitimately pretty happy, who was exhausted physically and mentally, or who was feeling lost. Hamlet’s line about “the trappings and the suits of woe” revealing the grief that not only seems real, but is real, occurs to me as I consider the physical appearance I always cared so much about at family gatherings. Hamlet’s mother, who has just married the uncle who secretly killed her husband and Hamlet’s father - see Disney’s The Lion King for an excellent synopsis - tells him something like ‘Son, stop dressing in black; it makes you look sad,’ to which he responds, ‘good, because I am.’ The exchange presents clothing’s power to either reflect or conceal our true natures. Imagine if we all channeled Hamlet in our lives, dressing to reflect how we felt instead of how we wanted to appear to others. Family pictures and holiday cards might look a bit different than the ones we’re used to seeing. Until recently, I really hadn’t thought about why physical appearance at these gatherings was such a big concern for me. I think I was desperate to appear just as happy and thriving in life as I imagined every other family member to be. I wasn’t being present and engaging in the conversation and experiences around me; I was fixating on how I could look the part of someone happy to be there. Sure, I was grateful for them, but I failed to practice gratitude.
Gratitude is central to the holiday experience, just as it is essential in everyday life; but I think around the holidays it’s a little more important to keep it in mind for what it truly is. Gratitude isn’t just listing off the names of people we love or the gifts we have in our life; gratitude is a practice, an active participation in a cycle of acceptance, appreciation and connection with the elements of our lives for which we are grateful. Gratitude and gratefulness are a little different, though they’re sisters with the same mother: gratia, the Latin for grace. When we’re grateful, we’re full of that sense of grace, that feeling of deep appreciation for our life circumstances. While gratefulness is the feeling, gratitude is the practice. In cultivating an attitude of gratitude, we act on the gratefulness we have in us.
As kids, we were in the practice of writing thank you notes for any gifts we received. It wasn’t something any of us particularly enjoyed doing, from what I can remember, since the action felt a bit perfunctory and like homework. We’d already said thank you, so why did we have to write it too? My siblings and I geniusly developed a standard script for each of them: Dear X, thank you for X. I love it. I love you. I miss you. Love, D. It was hard to imagine what else the recipient of said note would want to hear, so it felt a bit like a madlibs lesson in handwriting class, but we did it. I began to get adventurous at one point and started inserting sentences of my own into the notes. Things like “we went to Bare Cove yesterday” or “It was very nice to see you at Christmas” - very adult, that second one. As I think back on these notes now, I see immense value in them. Firstly, they encouraged connection of a mode that modern technology has had a toll on. Letter writing is a valuable practice for a number of reasons, and even though we may not have realized the value in it at the time, we reaped the benefit of learning to script our feelings of love and gratefulness early on. Writing thank you notes also functions as representative of practicing gratitude. In writing these notes, we’re channeling the feelings we have and actively sending those feelings to the person who merits recognition for giving us something in the first place. In doing so, we then give them the opportunity to accept a place in our own cycle of acceptance and gratitude. The Latin phrase for thank you - gratias tibi ago - I give thanks to you - implies that there is always a fitting recipient of the things for which we are grateful. And to really cultivate that grace within us, we practice engaging actively in the cycle of gratitude by giving back.
Letters are a beautiful way to practice gratitude, and there are infinite others that mirror that same cyclical practice. Gratitude can be writing a letter or sending a text; sharing a photo of our favorite place with the people we love; sitting next to your grandfather in silence; talking with your cousins that you don’t see often or laughing with siblings you see too often; taking time to read the book your aunt gave you because it made her think of you; making time for a call; walking the dog and picking up after him; making time to rest because your body needs it; having a cookie or seven; just being present. Sometimes it’s not something you want to do. Gratitude can be attending a wake or funeral; driving a kid to soccer practice; letting your sister dominate your Spotify or borrow a shirt, or not yelling at her when she borrows said shirt without asking; going to the in-laws for Thanksgiving while you’re missing your own family; fulfilling those expectations of the job you enjoy least. Gratitude can be waiting, not needing to have the last word, just listening, asking for help, saying a prayer.
Practicing gratitude cultivates connection and gives us a deeper sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves. Without gratitude, we starve ourselves of the connection to and awareness of this whole that we need to be happy and to live our best lives. One of my uncles frequently posts photos on Facebook of his family, the beach, golf ventures or his home life, all captioned with his signature “the great life continues”, and I love seeing those. They’re simple gestures, but I see his immense gratitude and appreciation for the gifts in his life in every one, and I love that he shares them on a platform where he knows his loved ones will also see and merit from the joy he experiences, because we know that his great life includes us as well.
I think if we practice gratitude, we find that we have more to be grateful for. It might not multiply the money we have in the bank or bring on success and massive talent like magic, but it works in other ways. I find that I’m a lot happier and at peace with my life overall. I have difficult days and experience setbacks, but practicing gratitude brings perspective when I’m able to direct my mind and actions back into that cycle.
I’ll use this last bit to say I’m grateful for you for taking the time to read this piece. Writing keeps me sane and brings me a lot of joy, and it means a lot to me when the people in my life want to share in that in some way.
