To greet 2025

the happiest little grinch...

Holiday Cotillion

​I love the holidays. So did my parents. And yet, one of my mother’s pet peeves, (one to which most of us can relate) would inevitably surface. She would send gifts to nieces, nephews and Godchildren, but not hear back. In the time before amazon, just getting a gift to someone entailed a lot of work. “Why is it so hard to acknowledge someone for all the effort, time and expense it takes?” she would wonder, exasperated. "Why are you sending the gift, then?" my Dad would reply.

What Mom was seeking, I now understand, was not recognition, but connection. Gratitude is actually just a form of deep connection.  When we appreciate someone, we see them in a new way. Even in appreciating something, we use a form of higher energy to connect with it.

Like most, I aspire to maintain that connection of gratitude with people and things. The power of gratitude is well-known. Intellectually, we know that its lack leads to disconnection, emptiness and dissatisfaction.
 
My husband gifted my daughters and me a gratitude journal this year for Christmas. You list what you’re grateful for in the morning, and revisit the journal at night to record pearls of appreciation from the day. Yet to my mortification, right next to my bed was an almost identical journal from last year that I had abandoned after just a few days. It's not that I'm ungrateful, it's just that focussing on gratitude seems to get lost in the business of life, issues beyond our control, the problems to address. 
 
Like eschewing sugar or working out daily, why is gratitude so challenging to prioritize?
 
It's not hard to understand. It seems that everything around us conspires against the angels of our better nature to steal our gratitude. Our consumerist society convinces us that we always need MORE: newer, faster, better, bigger. Even the stories and songs of our culture promote the need for more. “Never never never enough” the enchanting but poisonous hit song from the musical “The Greatest Showman” is certainly an anthem here.  Even Thanksgiving has become more about food than gratitude, a day to avoid family conflict as we gather in the name of thanks.

Then there’s the law of diminishing return, an economic principle that manifests in productivity, relationships, vistas, even toys. By the second week with any toy other than a video game, my son is bored. Even our biology seems subservient to the law of diminishing returns: just ask any alcoholic or drug addict.
 
How, then, can we live a life steeped in gratitude?
 
We think that when we are happy we will “feel grateful”. And gratitude may be a byproduct of joy, but we really have it backwards. It is not happiness that leads us to gratitude as much as it is gratitude that leads us happiness.

However, if I persist on “feeling grateful”, my gratitude journals will continue to collect dust. For it turns out that gratitude is not an emotion as much as a decision. It’s a lens through which to see the world, one that suffering ironically tends to sharpen. Gratitude turns whatever we have into enough. 

Upon further thought, why shouldn't gratitude be our default? Who of us can make our heart beat? Keep the planet spinning? The sun rising? We’re really all just along for the ride. We only get to decide how we view that ride. 

So even if most of us have a few concerns going into 2025, let us focus on what we do have and arm ourselves with that appreciation.