Grateful People are Happy People

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This Thanksgiving, many of us will bow our heads and mouth a few words about our blessings and whatever we believe to be their source. But giving thanks can be a far cry from actually being thankful. Like those who only adhere to the tenants of their religious beliefs while in a house of worship, some of us confine our sense of gratitude to a short prayer over a daily meal, or just at Thanksgiving dinner alone.

There are others, however, who live a truly thankful life. Within their spirits one senses a persistent sense of gratitude, not one confined to a holiday, but always present, like a warm glow illuminating all aspects of their being. If you are among the truly grateful, you are also likely a happy person overall. Research shows it is not so much happy people who are thankful as it is thankful people who are happy. In other words, the so-called attitude of gratitude comes first, and life satisfaction flows from it. 

We know thankfulness precedes and creates happiness because many genuinely grateful folks were transported there by, counter-intuitively, unhappy or even tragic circumstances. They endured a great loss, a close call with a potentially ugly fate, or a long run of adversity that reminded them of what really matters in living, which jolted them out of any “woe is me” sense of victimhood. Some who suffer adversity take the other fork in that existential road, descending into self-pity and bitterness. In contrast, their grateful counterparts harbor an abiding sense of their blessings which, interestingly, are rarely material and more likely about positive and uplifting experiences and relationships.

Is it wrong to be thankful for a new car, a year-end bonus or a remodeled kitchen? No, but acknowledging these kinds of “blessings” while ignoring those that give living its essential meaning usually leads to the comparison game. In deciding whether we are blessed or not, we often contrast our lots with those of others, or evaluate our current circumstances in relation to some past benchmark of well-being from our own lives. If we’ve never experienced tough times, have learned to value stuff over spirit, or been spoiled and coddled all our lives, then comparison is probably not going to help us feel grateful. Sure, we can expose ourselves to the less fortunate, but these “there but for the grace of God go I” thoughts usually don’t prove durable.

Why some of us are grateful and humbled by life’s small favors while others remain obsessed with what they don’t have or once had but no longer possess remains a bit of a mystery. “Life’s never given me a damn thing,” one bitter soul once told me, to which I replied, “It gave you life itself.” This kind of rock-hard resentment doesn’t soften by simply counting one’s blessings. Gratitude, or its absence, is not a function of arithmetic. 

Rather, it is a statement about our relationship with existence. To the grateful, life is a friend, albeit a sometimes challenging one that isn’t always tilting in one’s favor. To the resentful or entitled, it is an existential parent that has turned against its child or that can never satisfy an insatiable appetite for more.

We decide which to embrace. And if we determine we want gratitude in our souls, then giving thanks is less an occasional or annual ritual and more a state of being. In some Native American traditions, the act of living itself is regarded as a kind of moving prayer, an ongoing “thank you” that innervates one’s everyday activities with gratefulness. This is a felt sense of thankfulness, lived daily.

Because as Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic told us, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is ‘thank you,’ it will be enough.” And if that prayer is less about occasionally bowing one’s head and more about living with an abiding appreciation for one’s blessings, Thanksgiving becomes a state of mind, not an isolated holiday.

For more, visit philipchard.com.