Gratitude is Air

A Thanksgiving Reflection

Image generated by MidJourney. See alt text for prompt.

What I’ve learned about gratitude this year was finding that its depths held a way out of my darkness.

Dealing with depression a few months back felt like a shipwreck. In those moments where you lack oxygen, energy, and buoyancy, you are fixated on the lacks, the absences that now weigh heavily and plunge you towards the wreckage of the Titanic.

I lack the financial stability I once enjoyed. I lack the certainty of a career as a benchmark of success. I lack friendships whose lines have invariably begun to separate. I lack courage and self-determination; failing to see the hairline between rolling with the punches and setting boundaries.

These lacks plunged me into the depths. But gratitude is air. It is light. It is buoyancy. For as cynical as I can be, I have been humbled by its power in the midst of my maelstrom. The abstractness of gratitude became clearer when I started living in gratitude.

Living in gratitude is not just being polite and reciprocal. It goes beyond gratitude meditations, reflexive thank-yous, or even heartful handwritten notes. All of these are good, they are virtuous because they enhance my relationship with others and provide enough awareness to interrupt the patterns of my self-defeating thoughts. But when I was drowning, awareness alone could not save me.

Instead, living in gratitude is a deliberate and daily acceptance of my privileges, both earned and God-given, and honoring the presence of these privileges through action.

Living in gratitude is moving my body and honoring its strength by lifting weights, running hills, and holding the steadiest Warrior II pose I can muster.

Living in gratitude is accepting the unconditional love that I have¹ and to offer that love back; to forgive, to own when you missed the mark, to see others less as adversaries, but as equals.

Living in gratitude is using the talents I have. To use my words to delight, to inform, and educate, and to honor every opportunity I have to use them.

Depression has no “off” switch. It doesn’t desist when you scream “stop,” as your lungs fill with water. But when I think about the things I have done to help me stay afloat long enough for the waters to steady a bit, it always comes back to deciding to live in gratitude; to find a broken door amidst the shipwreck and ride out the cold night, hoping to see another day.

Happy Thanksgiving.

1. For instance, I could write “live, love, laugh” on a piece of toilet paper and my Mom would still be proud.