Reluctant Gratitude

On loving and losing

It feels so risky putting gratitude in the title, as I know the instant I see that word, I switch from reading to skimming, or likely swiping away. Especially #gratitude.

For anyone still reading (#supergrateful 🙏) here’s a quick story:

Years ago, my friend Lucy was trying to explain gratitude to her then-six-year-old son, Jack. She explained: it’s kind of like saying, I feel so lucky that we live here, and that we have the friends that we do. We’re lucky to have all of these wonderful things in our life.

Jack thought about this for a moment, then said, “So it’s basically bragging to yourself?”

Mic drop on gratitude. He was always a mini Yoda, with better grammar. 

There was also the public bragging, that online, hashtagged version, which felt performative, like being grateful at other people rather than being grateful to them. Tim Urban of Wait But Why once dubbed these sorts of posts the “I’m Living Quite the Life” brag. 

So why not just keep the bragging to myself? I could just quietly do this simple, 3-minute per day practice, writing down Three Good Things, which—I probably don’t need to be the thousandth person to tell you—promotes better sleep, lower blood pressure and inflammation, better mood, and too many other benefits to ignore. It’s one of the easiest and best things we can do for ourselves.

I could keep this tiny thing so private, I wouldn’t even have to confess it to my wife, Emma. No need for me to ever utter anything as mortifying to both of us as, “This is my gratitude journal.” Though she allows me a lot of leeway, being that I’m from L.A., such a thing said out loud might be too much for her Britishness to bear.

So gratitude—or whatever it’s often been co-opted into–feels a bit cheesy and embarrassing, but that doesn’t feel like the only thing that’s kept me from practicing it.

A few years back, I tried and failed to start a daily gratitude practice. The first thing that came to mind was Emma and our kids—immediately followed by a pang, the twin fear of something happening to them. This didn’t feel like a thing I wanted to do again and again.

I grew up with an Aussie mom, and I was raised with a deep awareness of tall poppy syndrome. Stand too proud, you’re going to get whacked. Best to just keep your head down and keep quiet about things. Saying a good thing out loud is like climbing a flagpole in a thunderstorm. 

If you allow yourself to believe this version of things, of course, the evidence certainly does pile up. We do lose everything and everyone at some point.

Two years ago, when my mom was in a memory care facility, I got a call that I needed to get there right away. She’d taken a sudden turn, and had fallen into a coma. 

I was in that shock-grief phase, not really taking it all on board, and yet I had this compulsion to quickly write something for her, even if she could no longer hear it.

I opened the Notes app on my laptop. Unable to put full sentences together, with shaky hands, I decided on a list. I would name everything I was grateful to her for. I gave myself just five minutes, as I needed to get to her bedside. This all happened on a sort of blurry auto-pilot.

She’d been a challenging mom in the extreme, so I initially felt I might struggle to come up with a proper list—especially in just a few minutes. 

Once I started, though, something dislodged in me. Despite the violence and chaos she brought to our family, this abundance of things tumbled out like little prayers, countless pinpricks of light in the night sky—some of them actually bright stars, given the darkness surrounding them. All of these blessings from such a difficult relationship.

My list feeling incomplete but just enough, I sped to her bedside and knelt next to her bed, clutching her limp hand. I read the list to her from my phone, weeping my way through all of these things I felt so deeply grateful to her for.

All the while, she was repeating a soft “mmmmh” sound, over and over, like some kind of engine at a great distance, her pale blue eyes wide open with pinpoint pupils. There was no indication that she heard a word of what I said, but I said all of it, thanked her, then kissed her on the forehead. That was it for us.

In the following months of deep grief and healing, and then after the death of my father just over a year later, gratitude has come to me unbidden, in waves. Of course the presence of loss galvanizes gratitude we feel for those who are still around us, too. We’re snapped out of the stupor we so often find ourselves in, that place of vague unawareness, where it feels like all of this will go on and on forever.

Emma said to me recently that she’s constantly, keenly aware of how soon the kids will be leaving home. I feel this, too—especially when our daughter specifically reminds us, which she loves to do, especially when she’s asking something of us.

Even when things are hard with them, or like yesterday, when I noticed a pungent smell in my car and found that my son had been shoving his discarded banana peels into the passenger door pocket, I feel it, how all of it will change, and how I’ll miss it.

I don’t yet have a daily gratitude practice, but I’m going to start one, at bedtime. Gratitude isn’t missing from my life, and I have no idea if this practice will yield all the benefits I’ve read about, but I’d like more of that feeling. It won’t slow the time down, but it might allow me to savor it more. It’s a couple minutes a day. What’s there to lose?

We’re all tall poppies. There are those tiniest glimmers of gratitude, for a good cup of coffee or the light at golden hour. There are those bigger waves we feel for all these perfectly imperfect people around us. There’s everything and everyone that we get to know for this brief, gorgeous time. We might as well brag to ourselves, as often as we can, about how unbelievably good all of this is.

If you enjoyed this post, please tap the heart ❤️ and share it with a friend. I’d also love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Either way, I appreciate your being here.

Practical notes:

Want a quick, free, and easy gratitude tool? I use a Google Form on my iPhone homescreen, which lets me tap three little snippets and submit in less than a minute. 

Here’s a little walkthrough, showing you how to make your own gratitude form, connected to a Google Sheet, in just a couple minutes. No muss, no fuss, no journal required. Of course if you like having a journal, that’s great, too.

Let me know how it goes. If you get stuck on the little tech walkthrough, or have any questions, ask away in the comments.