We Should Be Thankful at Life’s Banquet
So the American holiday of Thanksgiving has come and went. This article was supposed to be released on Thanksgiving day, but life and school prevented me from posting then. Oh well. Better late than never I suppose.
Often as tradition holds, everyone sits down around the Thanksgiving dinner table and one by one, each person says something that they’re thankful for. It’s a time to reflect on the good things and blessings you have in your life, as well as practice humility and virtue. But I think this concept goes much deeper than your average “I’m thankful for the food we have at the table” type-answers we give during the holiday.
See, in this reflectionary period, in this time that we’re able to give thought about what we’re thankful for, we have the opportunity to practice the virtue of wisdom. And while this is good, we often relegate this meditative reflection to the days and weeks prior to or event the day of Thanksgiving. And when the holiday is over, we go back to our individualistic, selfish, and every-person-for-themselves mindsets. Black Friday, I’m looking at you.
But this aspect of being grateful shouldn’t just be relegate to a once-a-year thing. You should constantly practice our mindfulness and reflection of what you’re grateful for. Everyday, you should be reflecting as if you’re at the Thanksgiving table. Epictetus writes in Section 15 of the Enchiridion that you should
[r]emember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet. As something being passed around comes to you, reach out you hand and take a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don’t stop it. It hasn’t yet come? Don’t burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front of you. Act this way with children, a spouse, toward position, with wealth — one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods.
This strategy of being patient and grateful for what you have in the present moment gives you the ability to better appreciate the things around us. See, the Stoics knew that wanting less correlates to increased gratitude, and that wanting more lowered it. Today, psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill, where you constantly need more and more to be satisfied, and each time you satisfy that need, you become more desensitized, requiring more and more to satisfy you. And in this pursuit of satisfaction, your gratitude for the things that you have lower and lower, because you’re focused on the next big thing.
I think that this is where that saying, “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone,” stems from. When you choose to look elsewhere to satisfy your increasing wants and desires, you truly don’t know what you have in this present moment until it’s gone. You weren’t truly thankful for it until it left your life and you now have to go without.
So when you’re able to get out of your head and look towards bettering those around you, doing so out of a genuine want to see others grow, you can begin to appreciate and show gratitude for the external things around you. When you show that active care and concern for another, you take in the person for who they are, a part of the reflection and meditation that can lead you down the path of gratitude.
It’s also in this selfless giving and betterment of others that you drop the focus on selfish taking. Such relinquishment of the pursuit of more just so you can have more allows you greater freedom of being in the here and now, present in the relationships you have, and the ability to recognize more opportunities to do good for your community. With the dinner example, when you choose to shift your focus from greedily taking the food from each dish to waiting your turn, you can better attend yourself to the conversations that are happening, take in the joy and happiness everyone is feeling, and appreciate where you are and all the work that has been done for the present moment to occur. You can even pay attention to who hasn’t gotten what dish yet, and pass them the food when need be.
When you are grateful for the things in the present moment, you experience a deeper level of happiness. It’s not happiness that makes you grateful. Rather, it’s gratitude that makes you happy. It’s in recognizing this that you’re able to shift your perception and become aware and appreciative of the opportunities and things that are available and present in your life. Even if your life is difficult and things may not be going well for you, with shifts in perceptions, you still have the ability to practice gratitude and appreciation. Epictetus notes in Discourses 1.6,
[i]t is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities: a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance and a sense of gratitude. Without gratitude what is point of seeing, and without seeing what is the object of gratitude?
Life is truly short, and no one knows when the call to board the ship will occur. But if you take each day to relinquish your selfish wants and focus on the present moment and appreciate the things you have, be it a family, lover, money, or even fame, the gratitude you cultivate will carry you forward in your life and quest to live meaningfully and virtuously, all the way to life’s end. As Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations 4.48,
[p]ass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting pace gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.
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