“Gratitude is not only an attitude. Gratitude is also a choice.”

Editor’s Note: Make the Days Count is republishing its top 10 articles for the benefit of new readers.  This article was first run on November 17, 2008. Article by Make The Days Count Contributor Marie Monroe

Let’s begin with an acknowledgment of the human brain – that powerful bio-computer that does all those wonderful things so well.  It is in there that I want to say gratitude works its magic.

How?  I’ll have to leave that to those who understand neurochemistry, but I can make some guesses with my intuitive understanding and a few facts about how the brain works at other times.   

As I considered gratitude, I found myself thinking about other things, things we deem pathological even. Things that occur in the brain like seizures and bipolar disorder.  An odd and circuitous route to the subject of gratitude, but one that makes some sense to me. Let me explain.  In seizure disorders, a phenomenon called “kindling” can occur in which the brain ‘learns’ to have seizures more quickly and more efficiently.  A similar thing can happen to the brain in bipolar disorder.  The brain ‘learns’ to have manic episodes more quickly and more efficiently as well.  Not such a good thing if you suffer from these maladies, but an interesting schema for other events in the brain.  Perhaps we can kindle all sorts of other things. Perhaps this is one of the basic ways in which the brain learns anything?

Kindling is often likened to the ignition of fire – using small bits of wood to catch larger pieces on fire.  It is a sort of fine tuning.  Ignition of a process becomes more and more refined as the brain experiences the process more.  In pathological conditions we hope to delay kindling.  In positive experiences, why not cultivate it?  This is how my circumambulation brought me to gratitude.

“Interesting!” I thought, “if even seizure activity and manic episodes can take me to gratitude, what else could I kindle up to do that?!”  It was an ah ha moment, but not an idiosyncratic one, not simply fine turnings of words.  I thought, and still think, I’m onto something. Why not with gratitude, for example, give the brain a recurring experience of it until it learns to kindle gratitude more quickly and more efficiently?

There’s a well used adage in self-help groups that has gathered about itself a body of anecdotal evidence persuasive enough to convince even the most cynical among us that it is powerful and true: that gratitude is an attitude.  The conventional wisdom of 12 Step meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous says that gratitude will change us, even heal us.

That’s not so difficult to imagine. We can easily concede that being grateful is transformational.  It inserts an easy U-turn into a dead end situation.  It evaporates gloom.  Sometimes, in the really good times, it’s not only what the doctor ordered, but it feels like a miracle.  It feels like grace.

These things are not surprising at all for anyone who has ever tasted gratitude.  Gratitude makes life sweet.  Gratitude changes the grateful.  What may be surprising, however, is that this wonderful morsel of consciousness can be a willful act.  Gratitude is not only an attitude. Gratitude is also a choice.

It is unfortunate that we often believe our emotional life to be something involuntary, something that happens to us as we wait to see what comes next.  This belief relegates emotion to that which must be endured, or savored quickly, before it disappears willy nilly.  In this belief system, we are reactors.  In such a reactionary world, it is difficult to imagine an emotional freedom – one of choice in which we may decide to feel a certain way and then induce that chosen experience!

In my tiny understanding of neurochemistry, I believe we can teach the brain to kindle gratitude more and more efficiently.  I believe we can practice gratitude by practicing that proverbial exercise of counting our blessings.  We can inventory our experience as often as we want and each time teach our brains more and more about how to get to this transformational state of consciousness.  If I count my blessings, however meager I perceive them to be, I am in that part of my brain where gratitude lives. The more often I go there then the more quickly and efficiently I can get there.

Recovery self-help groups suggest we make gratitude lists.  They work. Gratitude lists shift our focus.  They take us back to the sweetness of life.  It seems we cannot be unhappy and grateful at the same time.  For that, and these tiny little internal fires, I am grateful. I choose them.

“Be thankful. Cultivate an “attitude of gratitude.” Thankfulness is much more dependent on attitude than circumstance. When you feel the lack of what you don’t have, thank God for what you do have!” -Jim Stephens, GraceNotes

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