What grips most Canadians’ hearts about October, the fall season, and feeling grateful? Is it the turn of the season, the changing beautiful colours, the falling and letting go of leaves, or the warm, cozy smells in homes as Thanksgiving approaches?
More importantly, is being grateful something that should be pulled up at the turn of a new year or month and during festive seasons only, or is it a spirit that can be cultivated and harvested all through the year?
I start each day by expressing gratitude for the day, and before I take a bite of each snack or meal, I give thanks. When I arrive at my destinations, I give thanks; even when a loved one dies, I give thanks.
I automated these moments decades ago and cultivated them by participating in Thanksgiving in my life’s exciting, dull, confusing, and painful times. Being grateful, it turns out, is a choice.
It is easy to be grateful when things work out. But what happens when nothing is happening, something is delayed, or falls apart? Gratitude doesn’t show up at all. Yet, according to the American Heart Association, expressing gratitude “can improve sleep, mood, and immunity, and can decrease depression, anxiety, chronic pain and disease.”
A 2021 Harvard Health article points to the links between thankfulness and the link between serotonin and norepinephrine, which contribute to pain signaling in the brain and nervous system.
Now, there is a difference between being grateful and toxic positivity.
I’m not an advocate of sugarcoating pain with, “It’s fine, it’s fine, everything is fine” when, in fact, it’s not—or telling others to smile and choose their attitude. Toxic positivity includes pushing one’s ideal of happiness on another and treating them less than for not bending to those objectives.
Being grateful is a self-act, a spiritual practice that is a conscious way to live one’s life, not impose one’s views. I choose to be thankful even if the person next to me isn’t, and it doesn’t affect my ability to do so because my choice to act is mine alone.
Does it always work? Nope.
But the sheer automation kicks in, and I find myself ending the day grateful for something, even if it is the gift of contrast – which is experiencing what you don’t want to learn what you do.
When my lawn was destroyed, and that included my garden and all the hours I’d poured into it over four years, I expressed gratitude through gritted teeth for learning just how temporal things really are and that the beauty in my lawn isn’t necessarily that it looked good or that I made it so, but that I had a lawn to begin with—something I’d wanted for many years. And that helped me let go of the past and move on.
Being grateful as a habit kicked in when going through our trying infertility journey; I’d have little reason to be thankful as I drove at six something every other morning to get my blood drawn and experience intrusive and sometimes painful procedures only to experience heartbreak after heartbreak.
But I started to be thankful for small things that amplified every day until I would feel my heart burst with gratitude. I was grateful for the radio presenters showing up to work every day, the sunrise that greeted me, the Tim Hortons coffee ladies diligently working, the nurses and doctors at the clinic, the parking spot, the money to pay for parking, the pieces of machinery that were properly working, the snow trucks that cleared the roads each day… on and on it went.
This helped me show up every day with a pep in my step and a smile for all the incredible people who were there, doing what they did every day. And when we were finally successful, most of these people beamed, hugged me, and even shed a few tears of gratitude on my behalf.
Being grateful is good for your health and beautiful to experience. It can help lighten the load of dark days and amplify the light on great ones. It is a habit worth automating and cultivating every day because its harvest is bountiful and infectious—in a delicious way.
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Julia Katsivo Carter is the Customer Experience/Internal Affairs Manager of KATA Accounting and a holistic-approach business coach at Successful & Smart Business Coaching.