Gratitude Comes Easier at Some Times Than Others

To me, the semantics of Thanksgiving in the 21st century is more connotes more about the menu than the meaning of the word.  

Of course, with the thought of turkey and the spectacular dinner that someone is not going to have, there will be one or two stories about people being lonely on the day and family dysfunction where family members cannot get along, and there will be some news stories going down to the local mission where homeless and less fortunate people are being served meals, but it all gets away from the meaning of the word.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be a day of gratitude. We are supposed to reflect on that which we are thankful for.  Gratitude is a combination of the words “grateful” and “attitude.”  Grateful means appreciation and thankful.  Attitude is essentially your thoughts combined with your feelings, which we often call your state of mind.  If you have gratitude, you should have a state of mind that is thankful. 

How you feel gratitude reflects the whole of the situation that you are in.

Gratitude is often a reframe when something bad happens. Your mind thinks to something that could have been worse . . . or something else you could have lost . . . what you could lose.

Sometimes you are truly suffering because of the truly bad things that are happening to you. 

Gratitude does not always make you happy.

Reviewing the hymn lyrics reminded me that we can be so busy and focused so much on our work and life problems that our attitudes or states of mind are dominated by negativity.  I think especially in North America where we have the two countries of United States and Canada with the most secure and wealthy societies with the most freedom of anytime in human history, we still are negative and stressed.  I would venture to say that the negativity is related to the stress and how much debt many carry to have some of those luxuries with their status and comfort.  A truly North American stressor is the commute to work on congested super highways for two hours because someone has to commute from more affordable and larger housing to their workplace.  I have also thought that in such societies many have had the luxury to be stressed over such smaller problems because the larger problems of having basic food, shelter, and clothes are taken care of. 

Still, we can be get absorbed in our personal pain of both the present and past. It only takes a nanosecond to think about an abusive professor who delays your dissertation process a semester while they go on sabbatical to another country when you could have graduated and be on your way.  Memories can pull us into deep end of pain where all we can think of is how much of a rat bastard someone was to us in the past.

With our longer life spans, we have (actually) had the luxury of complaining about loneliness and family dysfunction.  We have benefitted from the intellectual and economic advancements in western societies to have the disciplines of psychology and social work to be able to focus on family and individual problems so people can develop improved self-esteem, coping skills and be more self-actualized.

We have benefitted from technological and economic advancements where massive amounts of information, entertainment, and sometimes knowledge is available on the entity that is called the internet.  The inherent problem with this last one, is that there is a saturation of toxic and polemic information that make makes people develop attitudes where they focus on the negative and not be thankful.

This brings me back to my thought about gratitude. It is hard to have sometimes, and it does not change our whole mood state as if we are in another world.   It is not going to be magical to have gratitude. You sometimes must choose and that choice is gratitude because there is nothing else you can choose.