Page 25 - Introducing The Gratitudes

find baffling. The notion that we should thank others is not hard- 25
wired into our brains, but learned from our parents. For a child the first unprompted “thank you” is momentous enough to count as a kind of initiation into a new level of human consciousness. Children learn manners at the dining table, and not manners only. Our ability to feel and express gratitude gets its start there. And it follows through the changes in our life, and our values. In people suffering from Alzheimer’s, little words like
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
“thanks” often survive the terrible ship- wreck of all other memories.
In Dante’s Inferno, at the bottommost cir- cle of hell, the ungrateful are punished by being eternally frozen in the postures of def- erence they had failed to perform during their lifetimes: trapped rigid in enveloping ice, they stand erect or upside down, lie prone, or bow face to feet.
“Gratitude arises from a specific circumstance – being given a gift or done a favour – but depends less upon that than on the receiver’s whole life, her character, upbringing, maturity, experience, relationships with others, and also on her ideals, including her idea of the sort of person she is or
would like to be.”
“The “givenness” of the world is apparent
even to people who reject belief in God: we
human beings are not, after all, the cause
of our own existence. We shall need to work
together if we want to survive the crisis we
have created. And what will connect us in this common endeav- our? Grateful wonder at the world’s magnificence and vulner- ability would certainly help – and justice, which can no longer be dissociated from ecological concerns. Gratitude, the “cement” of societies, is a visible aspect of love, and the enemy of greed and envy.”
– Margaret Visser
In 1555, Cornelis Floris, an artist fascinated by grotesque ornamentation, designed human faces made up from highly stylized vegetal elements.
So says Canadian writer and “anthropologist of the ordinary” Margaret Visser in her 2008 book The Gift of Thanks: The Roots, Persistence, and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social Ritual. She is interested in the kind of gratitude that is not compulsory or self- interested. She writes about the humility required to be genuinely grateful, and the essential ability to climb out of one’s own head: “Gratitude is always a matter of paying attention, deliberately beholding and appreciating the other.”
Gratitude is, fundamentally, about not taking things for granted, a kind of worldview. “Gratitude arises from a specific circum- stance – being given a gift or done a favour – but depends less upon that,” Visser writes, “than on the receiver’s whole life, her char- acter, upbringing, maturity, experience, relationships with oth- ers, and also on her ideals, including her idea of the sort of person she is or would like to be.” As she says in the Introduction to her wonderful book:
“Nothing orders our lives so smoothly and so subtly as the al- most invisible ordinary. The simple habit of saying “thank you,” and the notion of gratitude that underlies it, can be a key to un- derstanding many of the basic assumptions, preferences, and