I’ve addressed gratitude already on this blog a few times, and rightly so. It’s a transformative practice, because it truly builds a new perspective for you about your life. Now, if you’re interested in hearing an argument for or my journey with gratitude, you can click here and here respectively. But today I’m going to take a little bit different of an approach. Because gratitude, like anything else, is an imperfect practice. And it has its’ limitations.
Gratitude is great!
So we’ll start out with the obvious here. Being grateful is going to help you in life tremendously. When you take the time out to notice and appreciate the little things, you’re more likely to feel good about where you’re at in life, and what’s being given to you.
Not only that, but continually searching for these little things to appreciate starts to give us a different perspectives on the negatives in our lives too. We start seeing them as part of a greater whole, we don’t focus on them as much, and we even start finding the silver linings of our challenges.
So it kind of works on two levels. You become more aware of the good things in your life, which lends itself to improved emotional outlook on your life. And this improved emotional outlook on life started to filter your experience until the same kind of reality just feels better to you genuinely.
It’s become a cliché to recommend that anybody practice gratitude, because the people who do often sing its’ praises way too loudly. But shouldn’t they? Isn’t this the kind of life most of us wish we could be living? And if you found your life positively transformed, wouldn’t you want to tell others about how it happened?
What it can’t do
But practicing gratitude is not the be all end all. No amount of thankfulness will wash away the biggest setbacks and traumas in our life, nor should it. We’re not looking to be a vapid, brainwashed person. And we want to keep our feet to the ground when it comes to dealing with the reality of our daily lives, otherwise how can we navigate it?
I think we do people a disservice when we act like practicing gratitude will make everything all better. Especially those people who are legitimately struggling. When people are grieving, or recovering, or growing, thankfulness can be a tool in their toolbox, but nothing more.
There are some situations that seriously can’t be helped by simply getting in touch with our thankfulness. They instead need to be addressed and dealt with. Encouraging people to have a more positive outlook is great but I don’t think that that should eclipse our natural instinct to address issues and try to make them right.
I can’t be grateful about this
If you find yourself really stuck in life, you may feel pressure from those around you to be thankful for what you have. Obviously there are other people in the world who are less fortunate than you. But that may not get you very far. It might feel dismissive, and that’s because it is. Telling you to indiscriminately feel grateful while ignoring your concerns doesn’t address your specific situation.
And if you’re at the point where you feel miserable, then a more positive outlook on life probably would help you. So yeah, look into gratitude as a practice. But don’t feel like you have to be grateful for anything specific. You’ll find your things that you truly appreciate, and if they’re unconventional then who cares? This is about you.
In other words, don’t feel pressured into being grateful for anything in particular, even if other people are telling you you should. The objective in practicing gratitude is to get in touch with this feeling more often so that you have a better general perspective on your life. And maybe this better perspective will alter how you feel about that terrible thing. Maybe it won’t. But it will make you better able to handle it.
Just one tool
Viewing gratitude as only one tool among many is great in theory. But that should start the gears turning in our minds: what other tools do we need in order to deal with our realities?
Well, bravery, honesty, perseverance, and relaxation to name a few. The fact is that not everything in life is going to be added to our list of gratitudes. But we still need to be able to look our lives in the face and say “here’s who I am, and I’m going to handle this”.
Some of us naturally have these traits of well-adjusted people, and others don’t. But we can all learn them if we keep at it. And learning them may take a long time—longer than we think it should. But think of it this way, when you learn how to be able to deal with your life, then you can more fully live your life. You can have new experiences without worrying so much about a disastrous outcome, you can invent new things and enjoy life more than you ever knew you could.
Gratitude and realism
So when we look at gratitude, we can see it as one very important side of a coin. The other side being closer to pragmatism or realism or just generally rational thinking. We need both to navigate our world, and some of us need to actually learn both in order to achieve this.
If you’re someone who has trouble seeing the good in life, maybe you want to look into having a gratitude practice. And if you find yourself really stuck, don’t be afraid or ashamed to put some analytical thought and effort into things. Sometimes you need to take action to have the life you’ve always wanted, instead of passively enjoying what comes.
I hope this perspective was able to strike a chord in you that helps you move on to great things. I believe that every single one of you has that capacity, and just know that I’m rooting for you!
