Why Our Perception Of Gratitude Needs to Change

What is Gratitude?

We’re all told that all of our problems would disappear if we started to be more grateful. Is that actually true? Of course not. But there are undeniable benefits to our lives when we start to practice gratitude.

So, what is gratitude?

The Oxford Languages Dictionary defines gratitude as “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.” This is a nice definition, but I feel it depends a lot more on other people and thus may be harder for us to use in our attempts to develop a more positive mindset. I have chosen a simpler, more introspective definition.

I think gratitude is being thankful for the circumstances that you find yourself in.

Everything Has Layers to It:

Before we really get into the depths of gratitude and how to implement it into our lives, it’s important for us to realise that regardless of how you categorise information ( beginner, intermediate, advanced, conscious/unconscious competence) there are layers to everything. And this is really important for us to bear in mind as we examine gratitude.

First Layer of Gratitude

So I think a lot of people have a view of gratitude where it’s all about just making a list of things that you are currently grateful for. These things tend to be things that other people don’t have that you have and that’s absolutely a good way of looking at it. But like everything in life, there’s layers of understanding to things.

So this is our first layer of gratitude- being thankful for things you have in your own life that other people do not have.

Going back to our definition now, looking at how gratitude is being thankful for the circumstances that you find yourself in, then yes, part of that is appreciating what you have that other people don’t have but I think our definition goes a little bit farther than that and so let’s try and stretch ourselves a tad more.

What’s the next layer of gratitude?

Let’s start with a brief exercise.

I would encourage you to try and look at things that you lost in life or something that maybe it’s not that easy to be grateful for.

Perhaps it’s something you do feel a bit bitter or resent, such as a difficult memory that causes pain on recollection or perhaps an object of sentimental value and I would like to challenge you to look at maybe how has this negative experience changed your life?

How have certain people not being in your life anymore affected you?

Sure, not having someone who’s normally there for you in life has negatively affected your daily life, particularly if we use this the traditional view of gratitude. Now you’ve lost something, so you now don’t have something or someone anymore and it can be hard to feel grateful. Especially when you miss the best parts of someone or something. And we tend to do this a lot as human beings, what’s the old saying? “Distance makes the heart grow fonder”. We can definitely amplify the best things about someone when we miss them, and maybe overlook some of their shortcomings.

But what if we looked at gratitude a different way?

Perhaps when you look a bit deeper and you can actually see that perhaps by not having something, your path, your daily life or even a small thing about you has changed for the better, even in a subtle way.

Losing anything no matter how small it may seem to others, especially when it’s important to you, imparts the lessons to you that perhaps everything we do is finite. It’s limited. And one day we will all have to go and everything we love could be taken away from us at a moment’s notice. We become aware of our constant gripe with our own mortality.

Whether you believe in a higher power or not, we have all seen, particularly over the course of the COVID-19 Pandemic that life can change in mere seconds for anyone. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should just go and hide in a box but it does mean that even if we lost something or someone, those moments we have just become even more valuable, no matter how short. Because we realise that they could never have lasted forever, no matter how bad we wanted them to.

Unfortunately, no matter what people say or how spiritually wise someone is, just having something for a long time, we all tend to take it for granted and by losing it or losing someone, you do learn lessons and I think that’s another level to gratitude is to see how not something having has made you better and how actually learning that everything we have is borrowed. In the same way that energy can never really be created or destroyed, it’s only transferred, and at a very simple level, people come and go in our lives and we do spend time with them, we make warm memories with them that are really beautiful, but no one can stay forever and nothing can stay permanently and initially, that’s actually quite painful to understand.

Once you accept that, it does allow you able to spend more time in the moment and accept things, enjoying life without forcing a particular mindset. And as I keep saying, I think it’s by changing our view of gratitude and being able to accept that not having certain things actually makes your life better. It opens your eyes to see that actually without losing in life you could not have learned those lessons that make you who you are today.

We can all read a lot and one of the best things about mankind is our writing, because we’re able to absorb information that maybe took people lifetimes to discover in a very short time. But to truly learn something, understand and apply it, you have to really struggle and contend with the meaning and concept behind a lot different ideas and it’s not enough to just read about them and it’s only when we sustain a loss or have something taken away from us, whether that something is trivial or a major part of our identity, like a person that is very dear to us, that we really internalise those lessons and beliefs. When these sorts of things happen, you realise that you could not have learnt or fully applied those belief systems and lessons that make your life better today than it was before. And without having sustained that loss, if you had actually kept that object or that person in your life, you would still be in a position of comfortable decadence and you would perhaps neglect the blessings or fail to acknowledge the changes in your mindset and the growth came along too. It’s not necessarily that you were a bad person before you lost something, the loss just contributes to your development as a person.

So that’s really what this next layer of gratitude is all about. It’s being able to see those things and appreciate them and learning to accept how actually losing something can make you so much better rather than just looking at what you have and what others don’t have and appreciating that or being able to reciprocate kindness. Those things are important too. But unfortunately, life isn’t always kind. So actually looking at what you don’t have, why you don’t have it, what effect that’s had on you, has that actually made you a better person and how its shaped your life in a way that is for the greater good or a life path that you would actually prefer that you couldn’t have otherwise if you still had those same things and people in your life. And if sustaining losses hasn’t made you a better person yet (which is COMPLETELY normal and understandable), it’s really important for you to identify that and how you’ve changed so that you know what to do going forward.

It’s very possible that when something unexpected happens and you lose someone, you can’t think clearly and gratitude is probably the last thing on your mind. You may ask yourself things like “how can that possibly have been a good thing?”. It’s very important to acknowledge and respect your feelings and also to accept that despite all the self-improvement and growth of character you undergo, you are still limited. We all are. These are just the limitations of our understanding and we can all try to extrapolate a deeper meaning of life, but at the end of the day our minds in themselves are limited. There’s only so much we can understand, so you may never truly understand why something happened. And that’s okay.

We’d all love to be so wise that we can fully grasp the value of something without losing it, but despite our best efforts, we can try but we just can’t internalise the value of something until we’re certain we’re going to lose it. We may actually know the value of something in our lives, but we just don’t believe we could ever lose it. And for most of us, it’s only after we have lost something that we actually acknowledge the possibility we could have lost it in the first place.

When we experience loss or heartbreak, surprisingly, other values in our life can surface. And one of the main values that reveals itself when we lose something is our self-value. When we lose more and more things in life, we start to see what we really need in life, what we can live without and what we have within ourselves. Our weaknesses, but also our strengths.

It’s only when everything starts to go, the distractions become less and less that you get to find out who you really are and what you value about yourself.

And as the famous philosopher said:

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude”

-Friedrich Nietzshce

So perhaps you are still learning to understand that like every human being, you are one of the greatest works of art, a true masterpiece in the making.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzGNiVGz4T4