Page 24 - Introducing The Gratitudes

24
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
“Ritual practice is the activity of cultivating extraordinary ordinariness. It is necessary, be- cause human activity has a kind of entropy about it; life, like love, runs down. Things get tiresome and difficult. Body and soul cry out for something different, hence the impetus to ritu- alize. But if the ritually extraordinary becomes a goal or is severed from ordinariness, it loses its capacity to transform, which, after all, is what rites of passage are supposed to do.”
“A pastor I know, who gets a more privileged vista of human suffering than I do, told me she was sick of the phrase “first-world problems” - not just because it delegitimizes the perfectly real problems of those of us lucky enough to have enough to eat and Internet access, but because it denies the same stupid trivial human worries to people who aren’t. Are you not entitled to existential angst or tedium vitae if you live in Chad - must you always nobly suffer traditional third-world problems like malaria and coups d’état? If we’re lucky, we graduate to increasingly complex and better
problems, and once all our material needs are satisfied we get to confront the insoluble problem of being a person in the world.
“Even if we someday solve all our societal problems, people will still be unlucky in love, lonesome and bored, lie awake worrying about the future and regretting stupid things they did and wondering whether it’s all even worth it. Utopia will have an unendurable amount of hassles to deal with, endless forms to fill out, apathetic bureaucrats, taxes, ads and bad weather. Time will still pass without mercy.“ - Tim Kreider
■ Thanks for the Memories
Psychologists and sociologists are increasingly
discovering that people who regularly feel and
express gratitude tend to be healthier, less de-
pressed, more optimistic, less anxious, more
creative and more productive. American psy-
chologist Robert Emmons is a leader in this new
field of “positive psychology.” His 2007 book
Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can
Make you Happier shows that people who count
themselves members of religious organizations,
or people who consider themselves “spiritual,”
are the most likely to express gratitude. After
all, the spiritually inclined tend to believe in
some sort of transcendent reality, something
bigger than themselves. Even Buddhists, many
of whom don’t technically believe in a God, give ultimate status to interconnectedness, or “Emptiness.” Likewise, many otherwise non-religious Chinese people stress being grateful to their ances- tors.
In her 2008 book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Ideal- ists American philosopher Susan Neiman maintains that grati- tude is an Enlightenment ideal. In that spirit, she urges atheists and agnostics to avoid cynicism, which she calls “the attitude of admiring nothing.” She calls on non-religious people to keep an open heart. When the Enlightenment thinker Voltaire felt rever- ence as he experienced a sunrise in the mountains, Neiman says he wasn’t expressing gratitude to God, but something “closer to what you feel for an unexpected act of kindness from a passing stranger. That is gratitude for Being itself, and for the fact you’re alive to experience it.” Sounding somewhat like a Christian talk- ing about divine, mysterious “grace,” Neiman says reverence con- tains an element of surprise. “Like love, you cannot will it. Like love, it overwhelms you, and if moments of love and lovemaking can be reverent, it’s because you know you’re in the grip of some- thing vaster than you are.”
Gratitude is a moral emotion of sorts, one that is more compli- cated and more vital than we think. English speakers are obsessed with the terms “thanks” or “thank you.” We often say these words more than 100 times a day in a flurry that many other cultures