Gratitude
A novice monk joins a monastery. The rules are quite simple. You are only allowed to speak two words every ten years. After ten years, he tells the head monk, the abbot, “Bed hard.” After another ten years, he says “Bad food.” Ten years later, after having been at the monastery for 30 years, he says “I quit.” The abbot looks at him and says, “I’m not surprised. You’ve been complaining ever since you got here.”
The Torah often narrates the Jewish people’s litany of complaints, about lack of food and water, intimidating enemies, harsh conditions in the desert. One feels empathy for their plight, but the text implies that almost any situation, when viewed through a different lens, is probably better than it seems. It is none other than the suicidal Hamlet, calculating his fate as a Danish prince, who sums up so well the link between the inner life and the outer world, as he reflects: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
If complaining is an endless treadmill from which it is difficult to step off, it may be because, for some people, there is no specific item or acquisition or changed circumstance that will alter the equation. The problem is rooted deep inside, a lack that somehow cannot be satiated. “However hard we try,” notes the Buddhist teacher Steven Batchelor, “we will never succeed in filling an inner emptiness from the outside; it can only be filled from within.”
Such is the condition of the Jews in the wilderness who, in the Bible’s words, “desired greatly” or, to use a more literal phrase, they ”appetited an appetite” (see Numbers11:4). This is a very unusual grammatical construction, meant to tell us something unique and problematic about human beings. Unlike animals, who only respond to tangibly felt appetites, humans can not only imagine a given pleasure, but we may consciously bring ourselves to desire something.
Indeed, much of contemporary life is organized around making us desire things we do not need. As far back as 1927, a man named Paul Mazur, who worked for Lehman Brothers, wrote the following in the Harvard Business Review: “We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.”
We import our desires, as advertising seduces us into believing that we are never enough – not smart enough, sexy enough, rich enough, powerful enough, young enough, successful enough. Not yet enough. Never enough.
And so we continue living two lives – one that we perform in front of our neighbours, and one that we carry around in our heads as we do the daily battle with the phantoms of desire that plague our every waking moment, as the great Polish thinker Zygmunt Bauman reiterates: “There is always a suspicion … that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.”
This spiraling unhappiness is often—falsely-- based on the perception that the people around us are doing better, are more successful. Hence, in historical eras where many people’s lifestyle was equivalent to their neighbor, such envy dissipated. The historian Tony Judt, who grew up in post-war England, notes that the belt tightening and the perennial rationing of goods characteristic of that period was nearly universal: “After the war everything was in short supply. Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple “utility furniture” until 1952, food until 1954.” Judt concludes: “The family might have fallen on hard times, but we were all in it together.”
How do we break the cycle of false desire and its twin sister, incessant complaining? I believe that there are two key steps. The first is the idea of renunciation. To renounce is decide, to step forward into the future in a particular direction and to say goodbye to other directions. To live in this city and not that one. To take this job and not that one. And, of course, to commit to this partner and not that one. The psychoanalyst Allan Wheelis states the issue quite poignantly:
“Some persons sit at the crossroads, taking neither path because they cannot take both, cherishing the illusion that if they sit there long enough the two ways will resolve themselves into one and hence both be possible. A large part of maturity and courage is the ability to make such renunciations.”
To know what to keep; to know what to relinquish. To give up on the illusion that is not my portion and embrace the life that is mine.
The second step is gratitude.
When the Mishna in Pirke Avot says “who is the rich person – the one who is satisfied with his/her portion” - it is not just doling out good advice, but telling us that gratitude is the dividing line between contentment and misery, between happy marriages and ones that are shredded on the rocks, and in some cases, between life and death.
The Hebrew term for gratitude, Hakarat Hatov, literally "recognizing the good," informs us that the good is already there, in front of our eyes. And when we do not recognize that, we start by taking things for granted and end in a cycle of perpetual and corrosive dissatisfaction. The Jewish spiritual writer, Alan Morinis, reminds us of how each day, from the mundane to the earth shattering, there are moments where the possibilities for gratitude spring up and present themselves: “When you live charged with gratitude, you will give thanks for anything or anyone who has benefited you, whether they meant to or not. Imagine a prayer of thanks springing to your lips when the driver in the car next to you lets you merge without protest, or when the water flows from the tap or the food is adequate.”
Beyond all of the research about how practicing gratitude every day makes people healthier both physically and psychologically, the simple fact of transcending our self-absorption is reason enough to cultivate appreciation. In a world of me me me me me me me, gratitude announces that we are not alone, that we are not self-made, and that but for the helping hands that invisibly or tangibly support us, we would have no ground beneath our fragile lives.
As human beings slowly begin to emerge from a pandemic of suffering, the chance to thank those who have helped us along the way, is actually a great gift. Tell those you love that you that you love them, and while you are at it, thank your kitchen faucet once in a while, whether or not it answers you back.
For Professor Steve Horwitz, a man who exemplified the virtue of gratitude. In Memoriam. 1964-2021.