August 22nd, 2006
I once had a -er- friend who refused to show gratitude for anything. She felt that it was demeaning and debasing, and put her into a position of subordination to the person or thing she was showing gratitude to. At the time she explained it to me, I was at a point in my life where things had gone from "worse" to "well, pretty good actually", and I was in "grave danger" of starting to show gratitude for the good things in my life.
But, listening to her overpowering opinions on the subject, and refusing to be subordinated to my employers and friends, family and acquaintances, I took on the same stance that my former -er- friend had and started showing a refusal to be grateful for anything good in my life (but, like she was, I was all too happy to jump onto the Blame Bandwagon any time something untoward happened ... or even something neutral that could be misconstrued as negative, for that matter).
Now, this is a gross oversimplification, but I am going to paint simple lines to tell the rest of the story:
So I started showing less gratitude to people and coworkers, started expecting much more out of them than humans are normally capable of doing (for more than short periods), and started expecting more out of myself than I could possibly do (for more than short periods). I quit one job and went to another that I also quit in short order (less than 6 months). In fact, I jumped so quickly while looking for the perfect workplace that I don't even bother putting that period of my life in my résumé any more. And because of this mad job-hopping I ended up in a position that amounted to little more than Workplace Purgatory. I spent a couple of years working on software I didn't give a shit about and then they themselves drove me out of there through treachery and obscene indecent weasel behaviour.
Summary: I refused to show gratitude because I feared something that has never really happened anyway (and after emulating someone I shouldn't have bothered emulating) and so I ended up as weasel fodder. Well, I moved on to much better things and I've even started again to show gratitude when it is warranted.
So the moral of the story is to show gratitude for the things we have.
Q.E.D.
No, wait! Wait! That's not all!
I also want to say this about it: That there's something contrary in showing gratitude.
It works like this: Show gratitude to someone and they will almost always pull some sort of power-trippy little mind-fuck on you. It's practically inevitable. Or show gratitude to something around you in your life and it seems to break, or turns sour somehow. It doesn't really, but that is our perception of the situation. So it's easy to learn to stop showing gratitude because doing so always seems to give you a bruised spot. In fact, it looks from the outside like it might be better to be one of those little power-trippy mind-fuckers yourself ... and put that gratitude away before you hurt yourself with it! If you do something you think is right, but your knuckles get rapped for it every time you do it, you stop doing it, right or not.
And each time we bury our feelings of gratitude we appear to win a little battle with the world: We didn't expose ourselves to knuckle-rapping from others, we ended up looking "cool", and we still have the stuff we are studiously not grateful about. But in winning all those little battles we seem to lose some larger-scale war. Or let's put this into a positive light, since that is how I mean it:
Showing gratitude is difficult because it is standing up in anticipation of getting hammered back down. But exposing yourself to such social injury now yields rich and satisfying rewards later.
It's hard to believe but true: Taking the time for gratitude does not jinx oneself; it does not lower oneself into complacency; it does not redact the fight to strive for better out of us at all, despite it sometimes feeling that way; and, most importantly, it does not open ourselves up to a lower status in the workplace or among our friends or inside our families. Showing gratitude is taking all the pieces you have dragged with you up to the next level, and building a solid platform upon which you can continue the climb. Showing gratitude is slaying dragons, not tilting at windmills.
You know, in the end, there is really only one thing we should be considering: Working towards that happiness and sense of fulfilment that seems so elusive. We spend so much time and energy chasing down the dream that we forget to stop and show gratitude. And in doing so we are tragically wasting precious lifeblood. We are not here to chase down larger and larger piles of stuff, and what a senseless waste of life it is that we get too afraid and busy of stopping to show gratitude for what we have. It is the way to achieve at least some of that happiness and fulfilment, and it is only elusive because we make it so.
Right. So the moral of the story really is to show gratitude for the things we have.
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