What Can Gratefulness Accomplish
in Our Lives?

A mini-course in grateful living
by Patricia Campbell Carlson

Our lives are inseparable from gratefulness.  Why then, do we not notice gratefulness at every turn?  Its ever-present nature makes gratefulness nearly invisible.  It becomes the very air, the unseen backdrop to everything.  When people ask about gratefulness – what it is, what it can accomplish – someone who lives gratefully might feel that the answer is obvious and evident in every moment and encounter.  Yet this availability of gratefulness is a bit like the person who goes around looking for her sunglasses, having pushed them back on top of her head.  Until a friend says, “Why you’re still wearing them!” and until the person brings them in front of her eyes again, they are of little use.

Although gratefulness could and does fill entire books, it is helpful to bring it into distilled focus in a single place.  A good place to start is with the definition set forth by Brother David Steindl-Rast, who brought the word into worldwide circulation.  He speaks of gratefulness as “our full appreciation of something altogether unearned, utterly gratuitous:  life, existence, ultimate belonging.  Literally, it is great-full-ness." 

It takes an “aha” moment – what Abraham Maslow called a peak experience – to comprehend this great fullness which we have always within our grasp.  Such peak experiences take different forms for different people.  Perhaps you go through a terribly grievous time:  You’re caught in a war; you struggle against cancer; life’s meaning unaccountably slips away from you; a loved one dies; or in some other way you suffer an excruciating loss or series of losses.  When you begin to come out the other side of this experience, you can appreciate the simplest of things – say, sunlight shining through a leaf’s veins – as if it were a miracle.  Indeed, it is a miracle, but you never noticed before.  Or perhaps when walking through the grocery store you notice someone in a wheelchair and – before you can feel pity – she smiles at you in an arresting way that lets you know she feels perfectly whole.  Suddenly you see that your own life is more whole than you realized.  These are moments of awakening to the great gift which life is in essence.  They are awakenings to gratefulness itself.

For some people, such awakening comes in a single flash and remains for a lifetime.  For most of us, though, awakenings come as glimpses.  A moment of supreme aliveness on a mountaintop can inform our experience for months or years, even though we remember it faintly and wish we could recapture its initial vividness.  To hold on to that vividness requires practice. 

Practice takes many forms.  It can be a matter of heart, of mind, of will.  At best, the practice of gratefulness involves all three, interweaving our emotions, our thoughts, and our courage. 

One form of practice is simple remembrance.  This remembrance is centered in the heart.  During the course of day, we can set up for ourselves reminders of the gift that life is.  An artistic flower arrangement can be such a reminder; it speaks of the beauty which permeates each moment.  So can a votive candle lit and tended on a windowsill, or a set of inspiring quotes jotted on index cards and placed throughout your house or office where you will notice them periodically.   So can morning and evening prayers to which you faithfully adhere.  So can music which pierces the heart.  Such gratefulness practice brings you time and again to the feeling of your tremendous good fortune in simply being alive.

Another form of practice is study.  Study centers our minds.  Using texts you consider life-giving – Holy Scriptures, poetry, architectural designs, counseling guidebooks, dramatic scripts, the interplay of number and form, the wisdom inherent in Nature – you give careful consideration to the Mystery in which we live and move and have our being.  You study the meticulous artistry of creation, your own wondrously interconnected body and spirit, the creative power of words, the give-and-take which forms the fabric of our existence.  You develop intellectual riches worthy of life’s inexhaustible revelations.

And a third form of practice is living gratefully.  Such living comes from us fully engaging our wills.  This living begins with our personal well-being and spills out into the world.  Appreciating the gift of life, we bring ourselves repeatedly into a grateful alignment: 

By using our hearts, minds, and wills on a daily – or, better yet, moment-by-moment basis – we can bring the great fullness of life into conscious awareness.  The fabric of the world becomes a fabric we are weaving.  We weave this fabric not with half our attention elsewhere, but with every movement of the shuttle flowing from our appreciation of the thread, the loom. our own hands, and the people for whom we’re weaving. 

This weaving of gratefulness has the power to transform the world.  The good news is that if you look around you, you will see this transformation already taking place.