One Percent More Thankful
In his new book We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer writes–
The other morning, on the drive to school, my ten-year-old son looked up from the book he was reading and said, “We are so lucky to be living.” One piece of knowledge I don’t have: how to square my own gratitude for life with behavior that suggests an indifference to it.
The larger context of the collection is the author’s thoughts on climate change. Early on, he’s suggesting some comparisons between how Americans did little things (gas rationing, blackouts, home gardens) to help with the World War II effort, even if they weren’t soldiers, and how we are dealing with the massive problem of global warming. The war was far away, yet people really felt like what they did at home mattered. With climate issues, however, we continue to engage in behavior which is deleterious to the environment, even though we know better. It’s all just too huge and far away.
I’m not far into the book, but what snagged me about the quote above was the gratitude piece. I think many of us do feel grateful for all our blessings. We know how fortunate we are and how precious life is, yet we can’t maintain that all the time. I know I can’t. It is not an easy discipline. We feel grateful, yet we act otherwise.
I often wonder what else there is to say about gratitude, without repeating stuff over and over and over again. Every day I get up and look around and press reset and dig a little deeper and think in a new way about what I’m grateful for. Two days a week I polish something up and send it out into the ether so other people can look over my shoulder. I don’t know what it all adds up to, honestly. I don’t know if I’ll ever read anything I’ve written in my journal again. So what if I miss one day, anyway? What difference will it really make?
Or is it perhaps the process that actually matters? The wanting to? The dailiness, the quotidian?
What’s the long-term value of a gratitude practice. One percent? I thought even if it’s one percent better, that’s a lot over ten years or a lifetime or at least the better part of an adulthood. My brush with mortality in 2004 didn’t make me one hundred percent more grateful for life or make me braver all the time, able to make hard phone calls, for example, because I was so emboldened. Same with my journal, the point of this practice of focusing on what I have. It doesn’t always exist in the forefront, but even if it’s one percent that could turn into a lot over time.
Oliver Sacks wrote, in the first of his four essays making up the collection called “Gratitude,” that “above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
