Living Thanks

Gratitude is an action

Always thankful for these little rats

Happy day-before-Thanksgiving, American readers! I hope wherever spend the holiday, you are warm and fed and loved (and I hope you’re not traveling or gathering with a large group outside of your immediate household). I am busily marinating a turkey breast in buttermilk like the rest of New York City, and planning too expansive a menu for a two-person household.

This is an odd Thanksgiving. A quarter of a million Americans are dead. More than 50 million may be food insecure by the end of the year. What does it mean to be grateful when you know that so many people are so badly suffering? I’ve been tremendously lucky — I’m healthy and so are most of my loved ones; tomorrow, I will have a table full of food, and I will share the day with people I love (even if that’s via Zoom). Maybe you’ve been lucky, too, in some way or another. It’s wonderful that we have a holiday where we take stock of all we have to be grateful for.

I try to keep gratitude at the front of mind every day of the year; it’s a part of my yoga practice, and a useful tool in fighting the urges of envy, self-pity, and consumerism. It’s an imperfect and ongoing process, but a valuable one, and I certainly wish more people the world over would spend more time considering what they do have. Having a regular gratitude practice can make you happier and even physically healthier. We are all better off when more of us try to act from a place of abundance and the attendant generosity, instead of operating from scarcity and the attendant covetousness and smallness.

And yet the command to “be grateful” can also undermine gratitude’s very point.

Simply concluding that you are blessed or grateful is a shallow endeavor if you don’t also assess how, exactly, your blessings were bestowed. Being grateful means little if it’s simply comparative without context — “I am grateful I have food when so many people in the world go hungry” — and if that comparison doesn’t translate into action. Gratitude that fuels generosity, gentleness, and humility is useful and productive; gratitude that simply assesses and places one on a higher rung than others — or frankly gratitude that fuels only guilt or shame — is nothing more than smug self-indulgence.

So what does that mean? It means that — contrary to what some of my more woo-woo yoga people might tell you — gratitude is political. If you have food on your table tomorrow, it’s because of the incredibly hard labor of hundreds of people who plant and harvest what you eat; it’s because of the tax dollars that subsidized that food production and built the roads delivery trucks drive on; perhaps it’s because of the family you happened to be born into; it’s certainly because of a whole series of largely invisible political choices. It is a cheesy cliche, but we are indeed an interconnected web; vanishingly few people in America eat, move through space, and live their lives entirely as individuals, unmoored from anyone else’s decisions, labor, or money. Gratitude, then, means contextualizing what you feel lucky for: Being grateful for the food on your plate and the many people you’ll never meet who helped to put it there and the benevolent planet we all share. It means agitating and voting for politicians and policies that protect not just the end product thing you are thankful for — your turkey, your glass of wine, your pumpkin pie — but the people who brought it to being, and the earth that sustains us all.

It means, during a time of year when women especially hear that we’re over-eating and over-indulging, finding gratitude for the body you live in, and all the incredible things it can do. Your body is not a thing to be controlled, and food isn’t your enemy. Can you show yourself the reverence of nourishment, of giving your body what it needs to feel great? Can you feed your body like you would a beloved child — offering yourself what your physical self needs to be strong, healthy, and balanced; moving your body often and in ways that feel good; and understanding that indulgence and the pure sensory pleasure of eating something delicious is part of whole-body nourishment?

It means that if you are grateful for your family, your friends, and your community, that you treat those things with the care they deserve. This year, that might mean skipping an extended-family Thanksgiving dinner. It certainly means that after Thanksgiving, while a plague is still raging, you may give up some comforts or moments of pleasure for the greater good — you might forgo eating indoors, or hanging out with friends inside, or going to an in-person indoor yoga class. Because truly, how grateful are you for who you love and where you live if you’re willing to put them — and vulnerable strangers — at risk because, well, you really want to get a drink with that friend?

Can you take what you feel grateful for tomorrow and ask: Am I living in a way that supports and affirms my gratitude?

Am I moving through the world with care and generosity? Or am I more concerned with what I don’t have and what I want to do?

Gratitude isn’t a momentary thought or an achievement. It is a practice. It’s not just making a list; it’s being moved to act.

In this season of gratitude, I am grateful for so many things, including all of you. Thank you, always, for reading. Happy Thanksgiving.

xx Jill