The Gift of Ingratitude

I talk a lot about gratitude on this channel. It's a habit that has two not-very-subtle origins:

1. Gratitude is the wheel of morality, and
2. I'm not grateful by nature.

Prior to becoming a hermit monk, I was routinely guilty of chronic ingratitude. Which is why I'm always urging everybody else to be more grateful.

The problem with such haranguing is that it presupposes others need to be so harangued. Few things are as infuriating as being lectured by some freelance supervisor not to do a thing you were in no wise going to do in the first place. Prejudice that lacks the patience even to wait for you to fall into its trap is the worst of a filthy tribe.

But there's an even better reason not to invade this angel-forsaken terrain on a gratitude warrant: like so many other platitudes, it just wounds the wounded again. Now you're not only in pain, you're selfish and stupid besides.

Which is why I found this counsel particularly powerful:

"Please take this as permission to treat certain periods of your life as an unholy free-for-all during which you are not obligated to feel grateful."

The writer is American advice columnist Carolyn Hax, whose feature I encountered in a random newspaper.

Her correspondent was hoeing a particularly difficult row, and feeling guilty for undervaluing aspects of her existence that weren't damnably awful at that moment.

And Ms. Hax nailed it: you don't lose the right to resent intrusion on your peace just because other aspects of your life haven't.

I'm reminded of a period when I was badly injured by a calculating individual who left me crippled and broken. Even in distress I was aware that the damage had come largely with my own consent. (Pro tip: sociopaths usually lead their marks down an entangling trail of agreements, resulting in at least partial condemnation of their victims by the public when they at last drop the hammer. That's what they get off on.)

In his awareness that I could have avoided this, the abbot in my head kept disallowing my feelings of anger and offence. But at last I realised that this is what anger and offence are for. Misplaced they're a failing, but when justified, a critical source of truth and self-preservation.

I still remember the moment we talked this over, the abbot and I, and agreed that the time had come to let the dogs off the leash. What happened next is a tale for another time, but the spoiler is that I got the needed results. Taking umbrage under the watchful eye of my mindfulness practice was tremendously empowering, at a time when I felt wholly disabled, and ultimately made me a better person.

Memories that Ms. Hax's advice triggered. Because gratitude, acceptance, atonement, and other moral imperatives aren't absolutes. Like everything else, they exist within the great matrix of circumstance that comprehends everything in existence.

So there are in fact times when gratitude, like forgiveness and generosity, is not only optional, but pathological. The confines of this phenomenon are limited; no ground to stop being grateful as a whole. But for a year or two, in a specific context, till you regain a measure of largesse?

No more Goody Two-Shoes.


(Photo of guard dog from the nightmare realm courtesy of Todd Dwyer, the late Panoramio, and Wikimedia Commons.)