Meditation on Gratitude

Anushka Sen

Do you struggle with practicing gratitude? Do you believe, but don’t quite dare to say, that the problem isn’t you?

I’m not sure why I struggle with practicing gratitude as self-care. When I spell out my reasons for this difficulty, they seem hefty enough.

1. I’ve seen South Asian families use the dreaded tag of “ungrateful” to guilt their children into playing out their parental fantasies.
2. I’ve seen religious authorities put gratitude on a moral pedestal to convince the disenfranchised to accept their lot. Who wouldn’t choose the purity of gratitude, its immediate emotional pleasures over the ugliness and mess of protest that may never materialize?
3. Parcelling up your day into several things to be grateful for can sometimes create the opposite effect of plenitude. Am I really grateful for, of all things, an Amazon purchase? A Netflix show? Commodities I might have had the courage to reject if I had bigger things to live for? Surely I don’t need to crystallize evidence of my shrinking life this way.
4. I ask myself—what right do I have to be grateful for things that are mostly unearned privileges? (No this line of thinking isn’t self-flagellation, though it might flow dangerously near that poisoned well.)

As I review this list, all of it seems to be consistent with who I am. But you know how sometimes, when you have so many explanations for a deep-rooted discomfort, and they cover every genre possible—ideological, ethical, emotional, idiosyncratic—you suspect that none of this is the real reason? That if you could name your real reason, it would ring like a proud, clear bell through all the noise? That’s the hunch I have when I look at my list. And then I worry about my possible narrowness of spirit, which doesn’t let me feel gratitude—that snuffs out the warmth and grace I owe to all that keeps me alive.

Perhaps you are afraid of yourself now. Do you really think you are too parched, too hardened for gratitude? Be honest. This is a safe space, no rather, a space without shame.

Of course I don’t hate gratitude itself! If anything, it’s a fundamental element of my emotional life. My favorite memories of travel frequently revolve around the kindness of strangers—when someone ran after me to tell me I was walking in the wrong direction, when someone told me I was beautiful in the least intrusive way right after I stepped nauseous and disheveled off the plane. Gratitude is what keeps those moments illuminated in my memory, and it trickles into everyday experiences as well. Each meal I cook and savor reminds me of how far I’ve come from the days I used to have breakdowns over omelettes. I love to praise even the things I’ve had for years, that I can always access without any struggle: I once set myself the challenge of writing 6 poems about 6 different women friends who’ve always been there for me, and I was surprised to see how easily the words tumbled across a universe of memories and line breaks. Feeling that sense of thankfulness is a rich emotional experience. Far from being narcissistic, it constantly recasts you in relation to the world. But it’s the ritualization of gratitude in contemporary culture—and wellness culture in particular—that grates on me. Where you go by the advice of a therapist or lifestyle expert or popular mental health discourse and you routinely try to verbalize and quantify your reasons for gratitude as a deliberate act of self-care. In fact, when I call it gratitude culture and not just gratitude, it starts to make sense.

You brush against a kernel of truth. Dig deeper.

So what is it about this culture that gives me the creeps? I’ve moved far beyond a certain politics of defiance that dismisses all efforts towards health, discipline, and inner peace as bourgeois fluff at best, and neoliberal conspiracy at its most sinister. During this pandemic, the one thing that has allowed me to keep it together is a regular workout. It’s not something I had before, at least not in a long time. And my choice of exercise is yoga, that most interior, mysticism-laced poster child of wellness who speaks in little more than motivational whispers. I swear by it. If I still end up going to sleep at 3AM, it’s not something I want to defend as the mark of whimsy and genius anymore. That edgelord stuff is behind me. I now salivate at the thought of a sleep cycle. I get tingly at the possibility of quitting alcohol. But the minute wellness gets presented through the filter of a certain cultural ethos, I want to become that caricature of the philosopher-troublemaker Michel Foucault and go “WELLNESS IS A PRISON!” I knew it was more than a suspicion of wellness culture’s toxic positivity, or it’s capacity for lulling people into personal fixes for systemic problems. Those things fit snugly into my list of reasons for struggling with gratitude. But there was something more that was poking at me beyond the obvious ideological critiques.

Here’s the funniest thing of all. I broke through this wellness conundrum while lying flat on my back after a particularly soothing session of yoga, looking up at the late summer sky through a latticework of leaves. In that moment, despite the abrupt loss of a social life, the impossibility of returning to India after a year and a half of being away, the physical terror of the pandemic and the limbo of being an international student pursuing an advanced degree in a shattered economy—despite all of that, I felt glad to be alive. And perhaps in perverse defiance of the wellness ritual that got me to that state, I traced my feelings not to yoga, not to a conscious acknowledgement of gratitude, but to something much more immediate and intuitive. I felt glad to be alive because I felt glad to be alive. Yes, as much as I hate to say it: a tautology. Not an active choice, not an analysis of pros and cons or cause and effect, but a circular, self-validating conviction over which I seemed to have no control. Suddenly, being alive felt like the only good reason to be alive. Breathing was good. Skin and blood and organs were good. Bugs in the grass, good. Clouds, good. If I lay in a small balcony on a high-rise instead of the lush backyard (not my own) I landed up in this summer, that too would be good, as long as I was still finely attuned to the vibrancy in my surroundings. That attunement didn’t come from picturesque beauty or serenity, I was sure. I was just lucky to have stumbled upon it in those settings.

You’ve found something whole, something you can grasp. Tug at it. Does it reveal an architecture of truth, standing strong in the sunlight?

Somehow in a remarkable coincidence, I talked to a new acquaintance that day or soon after, and they told me of a moment in their lives that encapsulated this recent epiphany of mine. A few years ago, they had just been slapped with brutal legal repercussions for their environmental activism and could feel their life unravelling. At that moment, they found themselves holding a cup and thinking that they were happy just to feel the sensation of the cup against their fingers. That was enough. Having that exchange made my recent, only vaguely-formed thoughts take on a far more coherent shape. I realized that my problem with gratitude culture was primarily its way of making you narrativize your life in a cute, sanitized way. Journals. Bullet points. Social media posts. It made me feel that I was constantly skidding along a glazed table top. It never seemed to get at the sense of something pulsating, fundamental, and many-headed, like a strange but lovely cousin of the hydra, that lay at the heart of life.

Of course, I knew that the rituals and the paraphernalia of gratitude were meant to manage the feeling of standing in life’s sweeping stream. No one can deal with life unmediated. Vignettes, rituals, rhetorical frameworks, all help. But gratitude culture seemed (and still seems) to be about something that wasn’t life at all. It was about being able to mine your lived experience for evidence of value, and to get better and better at doing that for smaller and smaller things. It works as long as you are comfortable inhabiting that conceptual world where your life is an aggregate of things, each of which have some irrefutable worth for you. Say butter pecan ice cream, or your mother wishing you goodnight, is undoubtedly A Good Thing. If either or both of them happened to bless your day, you can write that down in a gratitude journal, knowing you have no choice but to bow to their innate goodness. But to me, such exercises have the same relationship to actual, energizing gratitude as flash mobs or dance challenges do to spontaneous dance. Choreographed or simulated action constantly reminds you what life is supposedly all about in the hope that it will trigger actual joy or faith in the whole business; a visceral reaction on the other hand reminds you of your subtle, stubborn, surprising responsiveness to the movements of your own ecosystem. Your response needn’t even be graceful. It could be nothing more than a headbop, a returned smile, an involuntary squeal of affection, but its relationship to the world and its stimulating properties is more mutual, less burdensome, than the act of reframing your life with new, palatable meaning.

You found it. Something sturdy to hang your truth on. But prepare for acid rains of uncertainty.

Excitedly, I texted a close friend about this grand revelation—how it wasn’t gratitude but this sense of connectedness to material being that made life meaningful. In perfect, devastating innocence, she replied: “oh you mean mindfulness?” Of course! Of course there was a wellness term for it! Mindfulness. Walking with bare feet. Using a french press instead of a coffee machine. Paper instead of screens. Sniffing your fabric softener with tears of gratitude in your eyes as you drag yourself to the laundry room. Again, this idea of authenticity or good-old fashioned organic existence, which isn’t what I was after at all. Mindfulness: a catchy phrase that in return for ease of access, seemed to trade in all sense of vitality, of complex but compelling texture that gives life to life. My bubble was, if not burst, then certainly shaken. I wondered if I was overcomplicating things in usual academic fashion, perhaps romanticizing life (the secularist’s fallacy) even as I decried any explicit gestures towards mysticism. After all, what good was my sense of vitality if it was so involuntary and I couldn’t access it whenever I wanted? Was yoga the solution to everything all along?

What shape remains?

I still haven’t given up on my suspicion of gratitude culture, or that sense of having landed on a truth while I was talking to my then new friend about vitality. While I want to make sure that I don’t convert sensory experience into some new sacred register of existence, I know for a fact that I don’t trust gratitude purely as the result of adding up a series of value-laden experiences. As risky as it seems, I’m keeping faith in a tautology. I know that if I occasionally feel glad to be alive because I’m glad to be alive, the accumulation of such moments will do more to reassure me about my connection to the sprawling, bustling network of our world than any ritualized meta-commentary on my own life ever could. Perhaps over time it will get easier to find my way into that state I was in when I lay on the grass that day. If aspects of wellness such as exercise or that elusive sleep cycle help me calm my mind and enter that state of receptiveness, then I welcome those (and I would never look down on anyone for depending on them). But they are, in and of themselves, not my true motivation to make my way through the obscene pains of our world. For that surge of rejuvenating, life-affirming gratitude that makes this slog feel “worth it,” I have only one method: keep myself open to the forces that will play on my attention, my curiosity, my capacity for pleasure, to remind me that I continue to live for things I don’t even know I will encounter.

It is difficult to prepare for spontaneity, for unpredictability. Let’s try for a minute to embrace the foolishness and failure of this resolution. Bear with me:

Can you remember a time when gratitude bubbled up in you, abundant and unasked? How much does this memory linger in your bones? Who would you be without it?

Or,

Can you imagine a situation, where despite a leaden soul, your body might wake up and respond vigorously to some happening in the sensory world? Onions frying perhaps. Or the prickle of a dog’s fur on your cheek. Anything.

Or,

Have you ever thought about why we hum? And why we sometimes hum a muddled original tune—not one of a song we ever heard? What makes the body sing, produce its own music? The next time it happens to you, do you think you will notice?