On Gratitude: reflections on the question “what are you grateful for?”

There’s so much I remember from being a kid and going to my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving. I remember the long table, the white and blue decor, the tiny table at the very end of the long table that was not the “kids’ table”, but the dolls’ table, and the dolls who themselves had real china teacups. I remember sitting at that table with my family, my aunt and uncle, my cousins, and usually a couple more distant relatives or the kinds of quirky people my grandma had a tendency to befriend. And I remember the inevitable instruction to go around the table and each say one thing we were grateful for.

I hated this exercise. I still hate this exercise, because it still pops up, especially this time of year. When I was working at a large organization, it was the ice breaker for every monthly meeting in all of November. “What are you grateful for?”

As an adult who (and I’m pretty sure this was true as a kid, too), with barely a moment’s thought, can come up with a “right” answer (“so grateful for our health this year especially”) and a “funny” answer (“so grateful my kids have 2.5 days of school this week and I can get in some catch up before the 4-day weekend!”), the question feels wrong.

I am, of course, very grateful for both those things, but the answers always feel trite, and perhaps more significant is the wondering: what does it say about me if I hate this exercise? This exercise that everyone seems so enthusiastic to include every year.

Often, I end up feeling guilty: the implication is that if I hate talking about gratitude, if I don’t have a heartfelt, genuine answer to this question on the spot, I am ungrateful. If I’m not effusive enough with my gushing over meals or gifts, if my thank you notes don’t come quickly enough, I must be spoiled, I must not care about the cost, the effort, the thought that went into the menu planning, the cooking, the presentation, the wrapping. Or I must not care about the person who put in the effort, who spent the time, energy, and money to create the thing I’m not gushing over.

I get it -- sometimes I’ve come up with a gift I think is incredible and gotten no response, to the point that I’ve wondered if it didn’t arrive or if I really messed it up. How comforting it would have been in those cases to get a glowing “thank you”, an immediate phone message saying how well I had done. Sometimes after an effort on my part, I’ve had silence. It’s uncomfortable. It makes you question your effort.

But I think the problem both in the gift giving and the classic November ice breaker is that when we ask people to say in the moment that’s convenient for us what they’re grateful for, we’re often looking for an answer that makes us feel good or we’re pushing our agenda, our ideas about the importance of gratitude - hence my learning to say the “right” answer or the “funny” answer for all those Thanksgivings and all those monthly meetings. We’re looking for “please” and “thank you.” We’re not actually inspiring gratitude.

Instead of asking others “what are you grateful for?” we might instead ask ourselves “what am I hoping to accomplish by asking this question?” Do I want to share what I’m grateful for? Do I want people to thank me? Do I want to remind people about how good it can feel to express gratitude - for ourselves and for others? Is asking this question the best way to do any of these? What other ways might I try?

Now, I’m not saying I have a great solution: I want my kids to say please and thank you so that people don’t think I’m raising ungrateful, spoiled brats, but also because it makes me feel good to be thanked. Plus, even as I write this, I am having to push back against the voice inside of me saying “Sarah, you are going to look like a fool. You have so much to be grateful for. How hard would it be to just say the gratitude thing?”

But that’s about me - it’s not about them. So, here’s my plan: I’m not going to make anyone tell me what they’re grateful for on Thanksgiving, and especially not my children. I’m going to tell my kids (and as much as possible, to show them, too) how much I love spending time with them, how lucky I feel to have so many wonderful people in my life, how fortunate I feel to experience privilege in the many ways that I do, how thankful I feel that we and our loved ones have stayed healthy especially at a time when so many others have not, how rested and well taken care of I feel after eating the delicious food our family can afford to buy and take time to prepare.

And it will be ok if I don’t happen to tell them this on Thanksgiving Day because I know that I tend to have a lot of feelings on Thanksgiving Day, and many of them have nothing to do with gratitude. There’s the anxiety around getting the meal cooked, the stress around which family we are with and not with, the sadness about the historical context of the holiday and the ways we still have so far to go, the guilt that I should feel more grateful on this day -- all feelings that tend to make me feel less grateful in that particular moment.

Can I find something to be grateful for anyway? Absolutely! I’m a good student, I know how to “talk the gratitude talk.” But does doing so make me feel grateful? Does it teach my children the importance of gratitude? It might. Or maybe it just reinforces a sense that we should be feeling something that we’re not.

What’s more important to me is knowing that not feeling grateful on one particular day or in one particular moment doesn’t make me ungrateful, it doesn’t make me anything other than a human being who has a range of feelings, feelings that cannot be forced into something they are not. Just as feeling sad on one particular day or in one particular moment doesn’t make me an unhappy person.

And that fact? The fact that feelings are temporary, the unpleasant ones right alongside the pleasant ones, and that those feelings don’t define who I am? When I can remember it, that’s something I feel really grateful for.

That and the unspoken but deeply felt lessons I learned from my grandma. The act of not only including but also befriending those quirky people, of making sure everyone had something to eat that they liked, of taking the time to enjoy the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade while maybe also stressing a little about preparing the meal. Without ever listing one of these things, I knew she was grateful for them all - and we were (and still are) grateful for her. To me, these are the real lessons in the practice of gratitude, not having a one line answer to the question everyone knows is coming.