For lots of reasons, November is considered by some, including me, Gratitude Month. This week’s post offers some personal reflections on how I became a believer in gratitude, and some of the benefits. 

I’ve commented in previous posts about my basic belief that some people are inclined to negative thinking and some to positive thinking. In the extreme, we generalize that the positive folks are Pollyanna’s and those who lean negative we call nay sayers.

Noticing my predisposition to negative thoughts, I became interested at different times in how to develop more positive thinking. Early in my career, a supervisor suggested I try one of Dale Carnegie’s public speaking classes.

Through attending the course, one of Carnegie’s slogans stuck with me: “If you want to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic.” Personally, practicing enthusiasm seemed hokey, but in the end, it meant believing in positive possibility. I had to say it like I believed it.

Some years later, I was going through a rough patch. I had rebelled against the Catholic Church of my childhood upbringing and started going to a Unity Church. I was attracted to this church because of a husband-and-wife minister team who connected faith with emotions and real-life experiences. One of their repeated mantras was “Thoughts held in the mind produce in the outer (world) according to their kind.” 

This is a complicated way of saying we become what we think. Constant negative thinking leads to cynicism and resentments. These are not great fodder for loving human relationships or getting things you care about done. 

Over my years in Twelve-Step recovery, I have embraced the idea of doing a daily gratitude list. 

If you have a tendency to the negative, finding “wrongs’ in daily life is easy. And if you are inclined to perfectionism, this daily inventory can be exhaustive. Wise members address this by encouraging the completion of a gratitude list as part of the daily inventory. At different times, I’ve listed 3-5 things I am grateful for at the end of the day and/or kept an ongoing list of things I was grateful for. Presently, I look at moments of kindness, love, joy in my life on any given day; I savor them while also looking for ways I might have harmed others, usually those closest to me. 

Recently, Geraldine and I took a trip to Ireland. Her Dad’s family migrated from Ireland in the early 1900s. We traveled to Louisburgh, a small town in County Mayo in western Ireland, where her family lived. We could walk to the main street, which was four blocks long and everything we needed was there. This included a pub her family used to own, a grocery store, a community hall where we attended a students’ recital of Irish dancing, and a small book store. 

In the book store, I discovered my most recent encouragement for the practice of gratitude. The store offered four or five small pocket size books by the Buddhist leader and author Thich Nhat Hanh. My attention was drawn to one entitled How to Smile. That is an inviting title for one interested in moving from negative to positive thinking. Try smiling, and then digging into a negative thought!

The first two short pages made the sale. The author states on page 1: “We have a lamp inside us, the lamp of mindfulness, which we can light at any time. The oil of that lamp is our breathing, our steps and our peaceful smile.” Page 2 makes the case for a smiling practice: “If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.”

Each page is a short meditation on the challenge of living in a world full of injustice and pain, and being at peace through our breathing, our walking, and our smiling. I read a page each night before bed; I ponder how to be grateful for my many blessings, paying attention to them throughout the next day and then savoring them. I do that by breathing, walking, and trying to smile.