Three Snippets on Gratitude
1️⃣ Being Grateful = Paying Attention
What does gratitude have to do with mindfulness? Everything, it turns out.
After all, what is a moment of thanksgiving - such as grace before a meal, or appreciation for one’s worn-out socks (Marie Kondo-style) before tossing them out - if not a moment of mindfulness?
David Whyte writes: “Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.”
Gratitude should not merely be the intellectual exercise of tallying and valuing our things. Gratitude can and should be a state that we inhabit, arising naturally through the simple act of being fully present with ourselves and everything that fills our conscious experience.
David Whyte continues:
“To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witnesses all at once.”
👉 Read more here in David Whyte’s Substack.
2️⃣ Being grateful ≠ Being a Sucker
You might be worried that practicing a grateful attitude might mark you out as a “soft” person or a “sucker.” That it might invite other people to take advantage of your trust and openness.
Indeed, research1 confirms that in competitive interactions such as business negotiations, individuals who outwardly express gratitude can invite their counterparts in the transaction to act in more self-interested and exploitative ways. It makes sense. Gratitude is not the right tool to bring to a competitive interaction.
But other research shows that grateful people do not just accept unfair treatment without consequence. In fact, in one study2, people who felt grateful emotions tended to punish selfish or unkind behaviors more assertively than people who felt merely happy or neutral emotions.
While the research doesn’t speculate why this might be the case, my own hypothesis is that feeling grateful enables us to become more attuned to principles of justice and fairness. And it helps us feel more emotionally grounded and resourced for enforcing consequences against people who violate these principles.
👉 Read more about the research here.
3️⃣ The “Ovarian Lottery”
Warren Buffett has talked over the years about the “ovarian lottery.” This is the idea that the random circumstances into which one is born - and over which one has no control - are both the most under-appreciated and impactful determinants of one’s outcomes.
During a lecture to business school students at the University of Florida in 1998, he described this idea using the metaphor of a barrel containing billions of balls, one for every human being on earth. Each ball therefore represents a unique combination of circumstances - place of birth, gender, ethnicity, family wealth, physical and intellectual abilities, and so on.
Buffett asked the students:
“here is this barrel with 6.5 billion balls, everybody in the world, if you could put your ball back, and they took out at random a 100 balls and you had to pick one of those, would you put your ball back in?”
He continued,
“You don’t know if you are going to be born black or white, rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied… All you know is you are going to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion (balls). You are going to participate in the ovarian lottery. And that is going to be the most important thing in your life, because that is going to control whether you are born [in the United States] or in Afghanistan.”
Would you choose to give your ball back and take the chance to live in somebody else’s shoes?
If your answer is “no,” then consider yourself lucky and blessed to have this life.
👉 Read more of Buffett’s speech here.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 🦃
Thank you for this reminder! I would definitely not put my back back