The Gratitude Trap

This strange summer is starting to wind down.  From my high window the leaves of the trees below are looking tired.  The produce from our CSA share is abundant: tomatoes, peppers, corn, cucumbers, melons.  As we round the corner into Elul, we have the opportunity to do our own inner harvest of what we have grown this year.  It is a time of noticing both abundance and lack, of giving thanks and acknowledging scarcity.

It is often difficult to hold both the gratitude and the need at the same time and perhaps that difficulty is increasing.  We all know that cultivating a sense of gratitude is a resilience practice that we can do through journaling, praying, or writing thank you letters.  Gratitude helps us feel happier, more connected, even more trusting.  But there are some complications that arise through the focus on gratitude.

One of those difficulties is that as gratitude becomes more mainstream, it becomes more performative.  We post the things we are grateful for on social media and hope they are big and splashy enough to garner the “likes” and positive reactions.  Things that might have been real sources for gratitude fall short because they don’t measure up to our expectations or to what others are posting.  Suddenly, gratitude feels hollow and showy.  Where is the sense of joy and connection that was promised?

Another difficulty is when gratitude serves as a way of deflecting attention from our real pain.  “Ah, well,” I hear as the pandemic drags on.  “I really shouldn’t be complaining.  I really am so blessed.”  Gratitude becomes a source of guilt and a way to avoid feeling the suffering that arises from the scarcity we are experiencing.

But our needs are real.  My husband recently shared with me an insight that Rabbi Art Green learned from one of his students:  In the morning blessings, we praise God “she’asah li kol tzorki.”  That is usually translated as “who provides me with all I need.”  But in a hyper-literal way, it could also mean, “who made me with all my needs.”  God created me with needs. It is indisputable.  That is nothing to be ashamed of.  Scarcity compels us to connect, to create, to venture forth.  By hiding our needs behind a screen of gratitude, we miss out on an essential part of being human.

So yes, gratitude can be a powerful practice for resilience.  But gratitude can be quiet and small.  It can be noticing little things for the beauty and wholeness that they (we) are.  It doesn’t have to be spectacular and it doesn’t care about other people’s opinions.  It just brings a peaceful joy to the person feeling it.

And gratitude exists side-by-side with the things we lack.  Both are true; both are the reality of our lives.  Feeling one does not have to eclipse the other, any more than the abundance of the late summer harvest negates the tired leaves that will soon fall to the ground.  And perhaps it is precisely holding them together that allows the exquisiteness of this life to emerge in all its ephemeral sweetness – truly moments of resilience and ease.