Somewhere between Halloween trick-or-treating and Christmas decorating is this November netherworld known as “Thanksgiving” season.
Of course, the original Thanksgiving feast dates back 400 years to 1621, when the newly arrived Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians gathered at Plymouth for an autumn harvest feast. Through the centuries the feast became an American tradition to give thanks for what “god” and nature has provided for sustenance (choose your spirit master since the Pilgrims and Wampanoags worshipped different things).
Today we gather with family and friends to share a meal, take a break from labor, celebrate traditions, and be grateful for what we have in this world.
And that’s just the thing… I don’t think we’re quite grateful enough.
Maybe some are. I do know some people who practice gratitude every day — thankful for the people and places and things in their life that make it special to wake up and get out of bed every day. Those people are rare. The rest of us just go through our day sometimes happy, sometimes at peace with the world, sometimes griping and critical and angry with everyone/everything that doesn’t go our way.
I think it’s natural (and probably correct) to place ourselves at the center of the living universe. After all, sometimes you are all you have in this lifetime. But we definitely can afford to be more grateful each day for the things we DO have. At least more than we are disgruntled by the things we DON’T have.
Similar sentiment for the businesses and organizations that pay our wages and help us buy those Thanksgiving feasts. How often, aside from seasonal retail decorations, do you see businesses being truly thankful and showing gratitude to their employees and customers? Is it once a year in November? Is that anything close to often enough? Of course not.
Every organization should commit to displaying gratitude throughout the year because without its employees, volunteers, customers and other stakeholders or influencers they might not be in existence. It’s as simple as saying “thank you” but could include gifts or gestures of appreciation.
It’s more about the regularity and genuineness of gratitude than the outward act itself, but the act is important because that’s how the thankfulness is communicated.
As life quickly moves from one holiday to another — from this flash of gratitude to the long-haul of Christmas Giving — I propose that we all commit to showing how grateful we are on a more regular basis in the new year. Add it to your list of resolutions. Hopefully it will last longer than that new gym membership, the hiatus from swearing, or the two-week period that you don’t watch The Voice, The Bachelorette, Young Sheldon or whatever your appointment TV viewing might be.
If you’re looking for ways to be more grateful, I’ve listed a few suggestions that I found online. This particular list comes from a 2010 article in a Cal-Berkeley publication.
1. Keep a Gratitude Journal. Establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy. Setting aside time on a daily basis to recall moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable life theme of gratefulness.
2. Remember the Bad. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.
3. Ask Yourself Three Questions. Utilize the meditation technique known as Naikan, which involves reflecting on three questions: “What have I received from __?”, “What have I given to __?”, and “What troubles and difficulty have I caused?”
4. Learn Prayers of Gratitude. In many spiritual traditions, prayers of gratitude are considered to be the most powerful form of prayer, because through these prayers people recognize the ultimate source of all they are and all they will ever be.
5. Come to Your Senses. Through our senses—the ability to touch, see, smell, taste, and hear—we gain an appreciation of what it means to be human and of what an incredible miracle it is to be alive. Seen through the lens of gratitude, the human body is not only a miraculous construction, but also a gift.
6. Use Visual Reminders. Because the two primary obstacles to gratefulness are forgetfulness and a lack of mindful awareness, visual reminders can serve as cues to trigger thoughts of gratitude. Often times, the best visual reminders are other people.
7. Make a Vow to Practice Gratitude. Research shows that making an oath to perform a behavior increases the likelihood that the action will be executed. Therefore, write your own gratitude vow, which could be as simple as “I vow to count my blessings each day,” and post it somewhere where you will be reminded of it every day.
8. Watch your Language. Grateful people have a particular linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, givers, blessings, blessed, fortune, fortunate, and abundance. In gratitude, you should not focus on how inherently good you are, but rather on the inherently good things that others have done on your behalf.
9. Go Through the Motions. If you go through grateful motions, the emotion of gratitude should be triggered. Grateful motions include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude.
10. Think Outside the Box. If you want to make the most out of opportunities to flex your gratitude muscles, you must creatively look for new situations and circumstances in which to feel grateful.
Here are some additional resources to help you (and me!) get on our way to a more grateful, thankful year ahead.
How To Practice Gratitude (Mindful.com)
8 Ways To Have More Gratitude Every Day (Forbes media)
40 Simple Ways To Practice Gratitude (Lifehack.org)
How To Be Thankful When You Don’t Feel Thankful (The Atlantic)
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
